Nineteenth-century Protestant culture generally held marriage in high esteem, and the notion that marriage was “made in heaven” often explicitly undergirds the conventional resolution of domestic fiction. Despite many indications of a harmonious relationship between human love and religious faith, a countervailing cultural trend reveals a deep conflict between the two. Victorian Protestants worried that passionate love for another mortal creature might lead to heretical extremes, that human love might slip into idolatry, the worship of false and material gods. Jane Eyre memorably confesses that she has “made an idol” of Rochester, although she, of course, looks back upon this transgression from the vantage of marital happiness (274).Footnote ² In this essay, I focus on works in which misgivings about idolatrous love arise with more disruptive force. The marriage plots of Charles Kingsley's Yeast: A Problem (1851) and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) both abruptly collapse, bringing into sharp focus a Protestant religious anxiety that subverts the conventional device with which Victorian domestic novels achieve closure.

Kingsley and Brontë fully realize that their readers expect novels to end with a marriage, and both carefully foster that expectation only to crush it. By crafting plots that “deliberately thwart reader expectations,” they establish what Mariana Torgovnik aptly terms a “confrontational” relationship between author and audience (18). Torgovnik grants that the study of closure involves “relevant extratextual contexts,” but she emphasizes developments within a relatively distinct aesthetic domain. The discomforting ending of Vanity Fair (1847), for example, shows Thackeray giving free rein to “literary impulses anti-conventional and parodic” (108). Such impulses also arise in Yeast and Villette, but in these novels the urge to disrupt the conventional resolution of domestic fiction is not a purely literary impulse. It has a deeper motivation in religious anxieties about a potential conflict between human and divine love.

The broken marriage plots of Yeast and Villette require an appreciation of the extent to which concern about idolatry burdened nineteenth-century Protestantism. This concern often manifested itself through the assertion of national and religious differences.Footnote ³ In Practical Sermons (Reference Graham1826), John Graham observes that if his flock did not live “in a land of pure, reformed christianity” they might “have been, this evening, prostrate before the monstrous image of a Hindoo god . . . or, with the misguided members of the Church of Rome, . . . entreating the good offices of the Virgin Mary” (45). Kingsley and Brontë both reenforced such antipathies. On a Mediterranean tour in 1864, Kingsley writes scathingly of the “abominable idolatry” he has witnessed, expressing particular contempt for the “Mari-idolatry of France” (qtd. in Chitty 235). Despising the “painted and meretricious face” of continental Catholicism, Lucy Snowe, the heroine and narrator of Villette, approvingly observes that Protestantism keeps “fewer forms between us and God” (421). To Victorian Protestants, Catholic rites and forms of heathen worship further beyond the pale seemed to involve the worship of worthless material “forms.” Religions given over to such “abominable idolatry” were perceived as “meretricious” because they promoted false, ultimately powerless, gods.

Despite the fact that English Protestantism identified idolatry as an essentially foreign practice, it could not shake the suspicion that forms of the heresy secretly thrived at home. In the decades preceding the appearance of Yeast and Villette, many Protestant theologians published sermons that promoted a disturbingly broad interpretation of idolatry. In his Explanation of the Ten Commandments (Reference Vickers1847), for example, William Vickers insists that “whatever thing or person there be – whether it be riches or pleasures, or honours, or houses, or lands, or connexions, or wife, or husband, or child – if they occupy our hearts too fully, or if we love them too intensely, or if we trust to them so much as to diminish our love and our trust towards God, they are become idols to us” (42). In Victorian sermons and social criticism, condemnations of English “Mammonism” are especially prevalent, but, as this passage shows, the figurative interpretation of idolatry also implicated romantic and familial affections generally perceived to be “made in heaven.”

Many Protestant clergy thus sowed doubts about the extent to which love and marriage involved the danger of idolatrous affection. George D. Hill (Reference Hill1845) asks readers to consider “in how many ways we may really remove the Almighty from the first place in our hearts, and admit others to the seat he [sic] ought to occupy” (54). According to such ministers, romance initiates a worrisome contest between divine and human agents for the “first place in our hearts.” Clergy advise the romantically inclined to constantly monitor their feelings in order to maintain the appropriate hierarchy of affections. A tract On Marriage (ca. 1850) helpfully informs readers that the “actual order of the affections in a regenerate mind, is this; – those which are the highest and look to heaven and the Lord, are chiefly cherished, for such affections regard in the first place God's kingdom and righteousness; and all affections that look to the world and the body, are held in the second place” (16–17). While such commentators do not insist that love necessarily leads humans to neglect “God's kingdom,” they certainly foster a heightened sensitivity to the possibility. Those who fail to respect the proper “order of the affections” might well find that they have inadvertently broken the covenant between themselves and God. By admitting another creature into the “seat he ought to occupy” and thus “going after other gods,” they commit what this tract terms “spiritual adultery” (17). Victorian lovers who took such messages to heart carried a precariously balanced burden of fidelity.

Sermons on love and marriage impress upon readers the severity of committing “spiritual adultery” by imagining acts of retributive violence enacted by a “jealous God.” Samuel Noble (Reference Noble1848) represents the Christian deity as a fervent and easily offended lover. It is with the “zeal . . . of a love of which the most exalted and ardent human love is but a faint representation” that God “desires to have the whole heart of his people in return, and cannot bear that they should set their supreme affections upon some other god, or an idol” (52). “The withholding or withdrawal of the chief regard from Him,” Noble warns, “is unavoidably attended with wretched consequences” (52–53). The ominous threat advanced by Noble acquires chilling specificity in other essays and sermons. Praying for “grace to put created objects in their right place,” a writer in the Evangelical and Missionary Chronicle (1816) declares that “our depraved hearts will give almost any thing the place of God. Husbands, wives, children, friends, possessions, will soon steal in and be very idols” (“On Marriage” 48). The writer then considers the “incontrovertible truth” that “if any thing is put in competition with God, it will be torn from us, though it should be the darling idol of the heart” (48). Loving too intently might call down the wrath of God upon the idolatrous lover or even upon an innocent spouse or child. Those who accepted such doctrine must have experienced married love with moments, at least, of dire trepidation.

Of course, Victorian Protestants could find more lenient attitudes toward love and marriage. Many adopted a position akin to that of John Clowes in The Golden Wedding Ring (Reference Clowes1851), a discussion of marriage delivered as a dialog between a father, Paternus, and his children. Reflecting that “Jesus Christ teaches us to deny ourselves,” Miranda, the daughter, confesses that she has become “almost afraid of joy, even of conjugal joy” (11–12). Although Paternus reassures her that “joy in itself is perfectly innocent,” he nonetheless warns his daughter against the “natural selfishness” that might lead her to “separate [her joy] from God by not restraining it within the bounds of his order” (12). In the Christian Lady's Magazine, an article entitled “On Idolatry” (1840) encapsulates the contradictory emphasis of the moderate position: “Need we fear to overstep the bounds of lawful permitted love? Surely no!” (237). Even as the author attempts to relieve the anxiety of her readers, she reminds them that their love must remain “lawful” and “permitted.” In the conclusion of Jane Eyre, Brontë has her heroine declare, “I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth” (emphasis added, 450). Her qualification indicates that she has learned to reserve her “supreme affections” for the jealous God who dwells above the earthly sphere. Even within the context of a novel that does offer a gratifying romantic resolution, Brontë reinforces the notion of the “bounds” placed on human love.

The conflict between human and divine love that broods beneath the surface of Jane Eyre intensifies in Yeast and Villette. In both of these novels, in fact, the love interest of the central character dies on the eve of betrothal, frustrating the teleological drive of Victorian domestic fiction toward marriage. Internal evidence suggests that this unusual plot twist functions to punish the central character and readers as well for idolizing love and romance. Both novels certainly invest a good deal of energy in the development of marriage plots that suddenly collapse, and the language that justifies the startling redirection echoes the warnings of nineteenth-century Protestant theologians who caution lovers not to test the angry passions of their jealous god.Footnote ⁴

Discussion of Kingsley's views on marriage has been largely shaped by his vigorous advocacy of the institution. In 1848 (the year during which Yeast appeared serially in Fraser's Magazine) he defines the “highest state” as that “through and in which men can know most of God, and work most for God: and this I assert to be the marriage state” (Letters 76). In The Saint's Tragedy (1848), the hero refers to wedlock as “The Eden, where the Spirit and the flesh / Are one again” (14: 78).Footnote ⁵ Encouraged by such statements, critics and biographers have for many years emphasized the extent to which Kingsley champions marriage. Margaret Thorp justifiably asserts that the “idea of the power and beauty of monogamy bulks large in his whole scheme of life and in all his writings” (41). Larry K. Uffelman similarly takes account of “his lifelong celebration of married love and family life” (15). Kingsley once referred to “that terrible question of ‘Celibacy versus Marriage’” as “the cardinal point” of religion, and the link he forges between marriage and religious faith has directed much of the critical commentary on this aspect of his thinking (Letters 100). Robert Lee Wolff (Reference Wolff1977) observes that the issue of clerical celibacy led “pugnacious Charles Kingsley” into “many an impassioned defense of earthly marriage in all its carnal joys” (191).Footnote ⁶ In his analysis of “Kingsleyan Christian manliness,” Norman Vance stresses the importance of the notion that the “emotional ties of family and of romantic and married love are natural and pleasing to God” (105). Indeed, it is impossible to study Kingsley's attitude toward marriage without perceiving the extent to which it represented a key component of his religious faith.

Although this focus has furnished many valuable insights, it has eclipsed a contradictory and equally important source of anxiety: the suspicion that love for a human creature could engross the mind and soul, displacing the creator. The fact that marriage for Kingsley involved this hidden bind helps to explain the many problems that arise to foil marriage plots in his novels. As John Maynard observes, Kingsley “really fails as an author to bring alive the central experience upon which his philosophical glorification of married sexuality depends” (Victorian Discourses 127). For James Eli Adams, this failure reflects the cultural influence of political economy, a secular creed that “offered future satisfaction based on the deferral of present desire” (110). According to Adams, political economy produced a conception of manhood grounded in renunciation, an “incessant mastery of temptation” (111). This explanation of Kingsley's ambivalence about marriage is psychologically compelling and admirably attuned to cultural dynamics that no doubt influenced Victorian conceptions of manhood. Yet it does not account for abundant textual evidence in novels such as Yeast that links the painful renunciation of marriage to the fear of idolatrous transgression.

Although Yeast has traditionally been discussed in the context of the Condition of England debate,Footnote ⁷ it is also worth reading because as much as any novel of the period it captures the intensity of a clash between the Protestant commitment to renounce worldly idols and the conventional resolution of domestic fiction. Vance makes the point that the “formal anarchy” (79) of Kingsley's narratives reflects an incompatibility between the tenets of Christian manliness and conventional plot structures. The “entertaining and healthy activism of the manly hero,” he argues, “was bound to jar with the less vivid religious imperatives; patience and heroic martyrdom, self-abnegation and the discipline of the will” (7). My approach to Yeast develops a specific aspect of this broad point and runs counter to a long-standing biographical interpretation that explains the odd conclusion of the novel as the result of Kingsley's mental state at the time of its original composition in 1848. Robert Martin, for example, notes that Kingsley suffered from “fatigue” as he attempted to complete the novel under pressure from his publisher (93). Susan Chitty claims that Kingsley “had already published the middle of the novel before he knew how it was going to end” and that he rushed through the final chapters “in a state bordering on hysteria” (116). Kingsley no doubt experienced acute stress as he completed his first novel, but critics who perceive its unconventional ending as merely the result of “fatigue” and “hysteria” miss the chance to appreciate how the dissolution of the marriage plot represents a logical development in a novel preoccupied with the problem of idolatrous love. However odd and unsatisfying, the ragged conclusion of Yeast represents an aesthetic response to a vexing religious issue.

The eventual disruption of the marriage plot is not apparent at the beginning. When, in the first chapter, the hero Lancelot unexpectedly encounters Argemone, she “enter[s] his heart at once, never again to leave it.”Footnote ⁸ Kingsley describes this first exchange of glances as “eye-wedlock” and, a bit later, the narrator describes Lancelot as the “yet unknown mate” of Argemone (16, 26). Such references encourage readers to invest their anticipation in the teleology of romance, and fully three-quarters of the novel moves resolutely toward the earthly union of hero and heroine.

The marriage plot gathers force as a healthy alternative to perversions associated with Catholicism and “Mari-idolatry.” Lancelot's cousin Luke, who functions as celibate and effeminate anti-hero, finds in the Catholic priesthood a welcoming retreat from the threatening world of adult sexuality.Footnote ⁹ Kingsley represents his conversion as a substitution of infantile pleasure and security for masculine desire. “Will you reproach me,” Luke asks Lancelot, “because when I see a soft cradle lying open for me[,] with a Virgin Mother's face smiling down all woman's love about it[,] I long to crawl into it, and sleep awhile?” (80). “Mari-idolatry” encourages Luke to reject marriage in favor of a soft and celibate “cradle” and the illusion of unbounded maternal affection.Footnote ¹⁰ To Kingsley's mind Catholicism (and, by extension, Tractarianism) also perverts female sexuality. Despite her awakening interest in Lancelot, Argemone too is drawn away from marriage by the insidious Tractarian vicar who advises her to renounce the world by joining a “quasi-Protestant nunnery” (164).

Unlike Luke, however, Argemone is eventually reclaimed, temporarily at least, for a role in the marriage plot. Lancelot retrieves her from the “very strange paths” of celibacy through a display of Christian manliness (164). When Argemone insists that they part in order that she may enter the nunnery, Lancelot detects her repressed passion and exclaims “We love each other!” (178). “What was her womanhood,” the narrator asks, “that it could stand against the energy of his manly will? The almost coarse simplicity of his words silenced her with a delicious violence” (178). This displaced rape fantasy, in which “delicious violence” is enacted upon Argemone's voice rather than her body, sharpens the contrast between Lancelot and Luke, who foreswears male “energy” as he retreats sniveling to the cult of Mary. Crucially, Kingsley indicates that Lancelot's assertion of mutual love and physical passion carries divine sanction. When Argemone asks where her lover is “forcing” her, he responds, “I am forcing you no-whither. God, the Father of spirits, is leading you!” (178). Lancelot attributes his new-found faith “that there is a God who guides us” to his discovery of divine will in the “chain of circumstances” that mark the development of his love for Argemone (179). For much of the novel, the marriage plot seems to be written by the hand of God.

Eventually, however, the love that sets Lancelot on the path of righteousness comes to represent a harmful diversion, and Kingsley shows that the same deity who rewards deserving lovers by guiding them to the altar also has it in his power to frustrate the romantic intentions of those who offend him. “The providential world,” as Thomas Vargish observes, “contains its own dangers and risks” (34). After Lancelot loses his fortune and his friend Bracebridge commits suicide, the narrator forecasts the death of the heroine by revealing that idolatrous tendencies have infiltrated and corrupted Lancelot's love. Addressing the hero, the narrator ominously observes that he

Evidently, yes: Argemone succumbs to typhoid by the end of the chapter. In a letter to a friend, Kingsley asserts that “when we are fit for our bliss, [God] will work what the world might call a miracle, if necessary, to join us and those whom we love” (Letters 34–35). In Yeast, however, the hero's “dream of bliss” ultimately stands opposed to divine aims as a “selfish hope,” a distraction from the more important business of his own spiritual reform and his emerging commitment to undertake God's work in the world. The reference to Argemone as an idol even suggests an element of divine retribution in her death.Footnote ¹¹ “[I]f any thing is put in competition with God,” as the sermon above warns, “it will be torn from us, though it should be the darling idol of the heart.”

Even after Argemone dies, she exerts a strong hold on Lancelot's “depraved heart.” When Lancelot receives a love poem written by her shortly before her death, the “precious relic” produces an emotional storm: the “sight, the touch of it, shot like an electric spark through the black stifling thundercloud of his soul, and dissolved it in refreshing showers of tears” (313). By describing the manuscript as a “relic,” a word associated by Victorian Protestants with Catholic superstition, Kingsley indicates the persistence of idolatrous love. Still, the “refreshing” outburst the letter triggers represents a step away from Argemone toward spiritual integrity. In Hypatia (1853), the narrator observes that “[h]e who has worshipped a woman, even against his will and conscience, knows well how storm may follow storm, and earthquake earthquake, before his idol be utterly overthrown” (7: 202). Having “worshipped a woman,” Lancelot begins to experience the storms of renunciation. Significantly, it is the prophetic figure Barnakill who seeds the “thundercloud” of the hero's soul. He delivers the poem to Lancelot, provides solace during the storm of tears, and afterwards leads him into St. Paul's, back to the God displaced by Argemone from the “first place” in his heart.

At the end of the novel, Kingsley draws on a secular conception of idolatry to forge a connection between scientific methodology, spiritual regeneration, and social progress. Barnakill invites Lancelot to journey with him to a mystical eastern utopia, warning him that its lessons will be lost on him unless he finds it possible to renounce all his “idols – the idols of the race and of the market, of the study and of the theatre. Every national prejudice, every vulgar superstition, every remnant of pedantic system, every sentimental like or dislike” (332). While the notion of human love as a form of idolatry takes shape in evangelical Protestant discourse, Kingsley here appropriates a largely secular development of the trope. The passage alludes to the first book of Novum Organum (1605), in which Francis Bacon categorizes the causes of logical flaws or, as he terms them, “idols of the mind.” The reference indicts a spectrum of distracting values and institutions that have apparently prevented Lancelot and the class of earnest young men he represents from perceiving the true problems of the nation and effecting their reform.

Barnakill does not specifically name the idols of the mind that Lancelot must abandon, but in the context of the novel it seems likely that one of the “sentimental like[s]” that Yeast renounces, and encourages readers to renounce, is the marriage plot itself. Kingsley is highly conscious of the novel's unconventional form and defends his choice to reject a conventional romantic ending. In the Epilogue, the narrator disputes the validity of readerly frustration that he expects the aborted romance has generated. “Strange!” he declares, “that the death of one of the lovers should seem no complete termination to their history, when their marriage would have been accepted by all as the legitimate dénouement [sic]” (347). Given that the novel takes pains to foster expectations of a marriage, this explicitly “confrontational” response is somewhat disingenuous. The signs that proliferate in early chapters are certainly misleading, and the fact that Kingsley finds it necessary to address readerly frustration suggests an understanding on his part of the extent to which the novel promotes expectations that it does not fulfill.

The justification Kingsley offers draws a distinction between the form of art and its purpose. In the stormy aftermath of his lover's death, Lancelot catches himself imaginatively re-shaping the events of his life into an “attractive dramatic form” (308). He quickly realizes that he has neared the edge of a perilous “gulf,” the “true hell of genius,” as Barnakill terms it, “where Art is regarded as an end and not a means, and objects are interesting, not in as far as they form our spirits, but in proportion as they can be shaped into effective parts of some beautiful whole” (308). Claude Mellot, the painter mysteriously allied with Barnakill, casts further suspicion on the notion that art might serve as an end in itself, declaring that “Art was never Art till it was more than Art: that the Finite only existed as the body of the Infinite, and that the man of genius must first know the Infinite, unless he wished to become not a poet, but a maker of idols” (309). The fact that these theories arise in the paragraph immediately following the announcement of Argemone's death indicates that they function as meta-commentary on the dissolution of the marriage plot. Determined not to be a maker of idols, Kingsley fractures a plot that would have sacrificed spiritual development on the altar of beautiful and comforting form.

Had the marriage plot reached its fulfillment, Kingsley suggests, the idolatry committed by the hero within the story would have been compounded by the reader's idolatry of the love story itself. The open-ended conclusion of Yeast strives to enact Barnakill's aesthetic principle that art should function to form – or, more accurately, reform – the spirits of its audience. By replacing the gratifying pleasures of a happy romantic ending with the “stern realities of sorrow and death,” Kingsley attempts to pry readers away from novelistic conventions that pamper sentimental preferences but obstruct spiritual development (308). In the final paragraph, the narrator prods an imagined reader to convert frustration generated by the fragmentary plot into a productive dissatisfaction with the state of his own soul. Rather than complaining about the form of the novel, “[l]et him try to right somewhat of the doubt, confusion, custom-worship, inconsistency, idolatry, within him” (348). Kingsley's narrator speaks in the voice of a stern father, urging readers to take the more difficult but more righteous path of self-examination. By implication, the domestic marriage plot emerges as an institution analogous to the Catholic church, a maternal presence that pampers the romantic fancies of weak and effeminate readers.Footnote ¹²

As I have already suggested, Kingsley is not the only mid-Victorian novelist whose writings suggest a causal link between idolatrous love and a broken marriage plot. Long before she began to publish novels, Brontë perceived separation and loneliness as divine punishment for idolatrous attachment. In a letter of early 1837 to her close friend Ellen Nussey, who was about to depart on an extended trip, she wonders, “[w]hy are we to be divided?” and then decides, “Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well – of losing sight of the Creator in idolatry of the creature” (Letters 1:164). Her imagination, like Kingsley's, is steeped in the Protestant suspicion that unregenerate humans routinely remove the “Almighty from the first place in our hearts” and “admit others to the seat he [sic] ought to occupy.” This suspicion arises frequently in the pages of her novels. The heroine of Jane Eyre gains a measure of control over her tendency to regard Rochester as a god, but the problem of idolatrous love recurs in her next two novels. In Shirley (1849), Caroline Helstone's grave illness provides an occasion for the narrator to imagine a tragic scenario in which a person prays throughout the night for the life of a beloved relation. Finding in the morning “that it is God's will his idol shall be broken,” the lover “bends his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot avert” (442). Caroline survives her illness and, like Jane, eventually marries the man she loves. The hypothetical scenario nonetheless reveals the extent to which Brontë remains concerned about idolatrous love and the divine displeasure it potentially calls forth. Her final novel, like Kingsley's first, cannot dispel the heretical transgression without sacrificing the marriage plot.

Analysis of the works of Brontë and her sisters has long acknowledged the significance of the religious context of their works.Footnote ¹³ Recently, however, criticism on this topic has opened an interesting debate about the relationship between their imaginative writing and the religious ideas at work in the Brontë parsonage. In her finely textured account of these ideas, Marianne Thormählen emphasizes the “presence of religious dimensions in the fiction of the Brontës” (6). John Maynard, on the other hand, claims that the Brontës are “primarily secular” writers who use religious language figuratively (“The Brontës and Religion” 196). In Villette, he argues, Charlotte “recycl[es] traditional religious mythic language into a language to describe not existence and metaphysics, the outside world, but psychology, the inside world” (210). Maynard is right to insist that religious discourse provides the Brontës with a flexible vocabulary that they turn to other ends. It seems to me, however, that the works of the Brontës in general mark an early stage in the process through which a psychological epistemology separated itself from religion over the course of the nineteenth century. This is especially true of Villette, which persistently links the heroine's anguished states of mind to fear of idolatrous transgression.

Early in the novel, Lucy Snowe appears in the character of a young Protestant woman who, like the theologians quoted above, maintains a sharp lookout for idolatrous transgressions. She records an instance in which the young Paulina debases herself before Graham. She “crept to his side,” Lucy notes disapprovingly, “and lay down on the carpet at his feet, her face to the floor” and “softly caressed [his] heedless foot” (31–32). She soon takes the opportunity to admonish Paulina. “We should be friendly to all,” she preaches, “and worship none” (33). For Brontë, the sort of worship that Paulina practices intertwines religious heresy with a degrading self-effacement of the female subject.Footnote ¹⁴ Scorning Paulina's man-centered religion, Lucy acidly observes that “[o]ne would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but must necessarily live, move, and have her being in another” (25). Lucy later finds employment as companion to an elderly invalid who marks a later stage of idolatrous self-effacement. Although her lover has been dead for thirty years, Miss Marchmont admits, “I still think of Frank more than God” and recognizes that “unless it be counted that in thus loving the creature so much, so long, and so exclusively, I have not at least blasphemed the Creator, small is my chance of salvation” (41). Miss Marchmont illustrates the unpleasant fate of women who are “struck by God's hand” for worshiping a “creature” (41). The “darling idol” of her heart is first torn from her, and she is left to lead a sickly half-life. Ignoring this evidence of divine displeasure, she continues to prostrate herself before her lover's memory. The night after confiding her ongoing transgression, Miss Marchmont meets her “doom”; this death that follows so closely on the heels of her confession suggests another act of divine punishment (42). It also sends Lucy out into the world where she must rely upon her own industry and ingenuity, actively proving that she possesses a “mind [and] life of her own.”

In the foreign Catholic world of Labassecour, however, circumstances test the heroine's iconoclastic self-reliance. In her analysis of the novel's treatment of Catholicism, Rosemary Clark-Beattie fittingly describes Lucy as an ambivalent colonist. Lucy finds herself in a “setting where her adherence to the mores of the very culture she has fled sets her apart, in her own mind, as superior,” but she also ironically reveals “a perverse attraction” to the despised foreign culture (825). As Clark-Beattie notes, when Lucy can no longer support the burden of her lonely despair, she seeks solace from a Catholic priest in the confessional. A corresponding “perverse attraction” undermines Lucy's effort to differentiate herself from those women whom she denounces for prostrating themselves to strange gods.

This irony emerges with force when Lucy, who earlier warns Paulina not to worship Graham, immediately falls under his thrall when she meets him again in Villette. Having arrived in the strange city without her luggage and unable to speak French, she luckily encounters “a young, distinguished, and handsome man” who provides assistance (62). Not yet recognizing her old acquaintance, Lucy immediately commits herself to his protection. Her estimation of his class position – he “might be a lord,” she thinks – also begins to suggest the emergence of idolatrous veneration (62). “[A]s to distrusting him,” she admits, “I should almost as soon have thought of distrusting the Bible” (63). Within minutes of their meeting, the word of Graham begins to acquire the credibility of the word of God. The abruptness with which Lucy discovers a new “lord” calls attention to her interpretative fallibility. For the Victorians, idolatry represents a profoundly dangerous act of misreading.Footnote ¹⁵ Confused by her anxiety and her sensual response to Graham, Lucy begins to lose the distinction between “Creator” and “creature.”

Brontë emphasizes that love need not be requited to engross the soul and offend the proper “order of the affections.” Lucy worships Graham from a distance frequently crossed by her appreciative gaze. She attempts to justify the pleasure she derives from looking at his “handsome and manly” face by discerning feeling behind his beauty, but her deep fascination with his form, the “colouring of his hair, whiskers, and complexion,” amounts to a worship of physical matter (98). Lucy herself compares his “beamy head” to the “‘golden image’ which Nebuchadnezzer the king had set up” (98). The monumental size of Nebuchadnezzer's idol, “whose height was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits,” reveals the extent to which her erotic imagination has magnified the significance of his physical beauty (King James Bible, Dan. 3.1). Later admiring the features of his face, Lucy notes that “though well cut, they were not so chiselled, so frittered away, as to lose in power and significance what they gained in unmeaning symmetry” (149). A popular nineteenth-century hymn begins with a contemptuous reference to “the heathen” who “in his blindness / Bows down to wood and stone!” (Heber 80). The language that Brontë uses to convey Lucy's fascination with Graham's face suggests an imaginative process that corresponds to such blind heathen worship. Lucy describes Graham as a “well cut” and “chiselled” object, as though he were actually a sculpted idol. His form elicits religious awe in his worshipful admirer. “An inexpressible sense of wonder occupied me,” Lucy recalls, “as I looked at this man” (149). Like Kingsley, Brontë shows that Protestants as well as Catholics extend their idolatrous veneration from worshiped people to their written “relics.” The figure of the nun who scares Lucy in the attic is generally taken to symbolize the solitude and sacrifice imposed on her life. Crucially, though, the nun appears just after Lucy has discovered evidence of a “god-like” character in the precious letter she has received from Graham (244). If the nun functions as a symbol of “chastity and confinement,” as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest, it further terrifies Lucy as a manifestation of her tendency to prostrate herself before the things that she loves (435).

Figures comparing Graham to Catholic and heathen idols reflect the Protestant insistence on the lifelessness and emptiness of material deities. Those who bow down before them are bound to be disappointed. Lucy appreciates as much when, later in the narrative, she recalls her “warm affection for him; [her] faith in his excellence; [her] delight in his grace” (362). With a touch of bitterness, she thinks back upon “that curious one-sided friendship which was half marble and half life” (362). Disenchanted, she portrays their relationship with language that emphasizes the vanity of supplicating a material idol, a handsome deity cast in gold or “chiselled” from marble.Footnote ¹⁶

The story of the relationship between Lucy and Graham concludes, as it begins, in idolatrous subjection. Paulina takes her place in a conventional marriage plot; her union with Graham, purged of the corrupting taint of idolatry, receives the “blessings of Heaven above” (437). Lucy is relegated to a painful story that cannot be told through the conventional devices of domestic realism. She must narrate her desolation through a figurative parable that distances her from the setting of European love and romance:

Lucy revises her metaphor so that it develops associations increasingly evocative of abject devotion. As the figure travels farther east, from the Rhine to the Nile to the Ganges, the passion associated with it degenerates from love to worship, from a term suggesting ennobling affection to one connoting vain heathen supplication. Displaced from the marriage plot, Lucy depicts herself in a distant waste land of idolatrous desolation, bemoaning the loss of her indifferent god.

In her relationship with M. Paul, Lucy at first seems to find an antidote to the idolatrous subjection she experiences with Graham. M. Paul's affiliation to Catholicism seems to provide a chance to recapture a sense of her identity as a Protestant iconoclast. Père Silas attempts to derail the emerging affair by insisting that M. Paul remains devoted to his first love, that he “was and is the lover, true, constant and eternal, of that saint in Heaven – Justine Marie” (394). Lucy thinks disparagingly of this reputed “saint-worship,” in part because she fears that her lover's capacity for fidelity makes him vulnerable to more damaging forms of idolatry (395). Brontë confirms this fear, symbolically connecting Catholic veneration for the “saint in Heaven” with the worship of “uncouth thing[s]” farther afield (390). The panel on which the portrait of Justine Marie appears rolls back to reveal the figure of Madame Walravens, an old woman as “hideous as a Hindoo idol” (461). Lucy eventually discovers that Madame Beck and Père Silas slavishly dote upon Madame Walravens because she possesses a West Indian plantation that promises to return great wealth. To the avaricious “votaries” who hope to inherit her riches, she possesses an “idol's consequence” (461). Himself uncorrupted by lucre, M. Paul nonetheless becomes entangled in their cult, allowing himself to play the role of sacrificial victim on the altar of their greed. Persuaded to manage the plantation, he remarks, “[o]f sacrificing myself I made no difficulty” (482). Lucy acquires a sense of moral and spiritual superiority in opposition to the sinister idolatrous cult that stands between her and M. Paul.

Eventually, however, Lucy's intense love for M. Paul, no less than her physical desire for Graham, transmutes into a type of self-destructive idolatry. With Graham, it is his comely presence that evokes the idolatrous impulse. With the less handsome but more attentive M. Paul, it is the threat of his absence. As the date of his voyage to the West Indies approaches, she figures his departure as another “Hindoo idol,” one to which she bows down in superstitious fear: “The Juggernaut on his car towered there a grim load. Seeing him draw nigh, burying his broad wheels in the oppressed soil – I, the prostrate votary – felt beforehand the annihilating craunch” (493). Lucy compares her veneration of M. Paul, expressed through fear of his departure, to an idol that typified self-destructive heathen fanaticism to Victorian readers.Footnote ¹⁷ The comparison that links her veneration of M. Paul to the worship of Juggernaut supplies a particularly vivid indication of the spiritually and emotionally damaging effects of a woman's dependence on a male “creature.” Although her cult of love is based on noble sentiments, the sacrifice it demands nonetheless parallels the cult of greed centered on the hideous Madame Walravens.

Villette, like Yeast, emphasizes the irrepressible tendency of the human heart to commit idolatry, but it offers a more complex analysis of the psychological dynamic that underlies the act through the ongoing conflict within Lucy's mind between the faculties of Reason and Imagination. When still in love with Graham, Lucy tantalizes herself with the thought of expressing her feelings to him. Reason maintains order during the day, forbidding her the pleasure of such fantasies, but it cannot prevent the worship of strange gods by the yearning heart at night, when Lucy receives “a spirit, softer and better than Human Reason” (230). This “spirit,” an embodiment of the erotic imagination, defies the government of Reason by allowing Lucy to spin a fantasy of reciprocated love. Lucy so appreciates the visitation that she exclaims to the spirit, “[w]hen I bend the knee to other than God, it shall be at thy white and winged feet . . . Temples have been reared to the sun – altars dedicated to the Moon. Oh, greater glory! To thee neither hands build, nor lips consecrate; but hearts, through ages, are faithful to thy worship” (230). Here the idolatrous impulse is directed not toward Graham himself, but rather toward the faculty of mind that invents and develops a story of mutual affection. In the morning, Reason regains control, and Lucy represses the “impulse to fond idolatry” (231). Under the sway of this stern realist, she perceives that the deity whom she had worshiped the night before as her “Sovereign complete!” is in fact powerless to make life conform to her dreams (230). Once again she becomes convinced that “Hope [is] a false idol, blind, bloodless, and of granite core” (160).Footnote ¹⁸ Loveless reality, the “trial God had appointed,” inevitably defeats the fantasies spun by desire (160).

Under the influence of dread, no less than desire, Imagination produces dreams and fantasies that fail to account for lived experience. Lucy learns to appreciate this after M. Paul leaves for the West Indies. The “great Juggernaut” of his departure moves toward her “lofty, loud, and sullen,” but it passes by quietly without doing harm (493). Considering the paradox that in its wake she experiences the happiest period of her life, Lucy observes that fear, like desire, “sometimes imagines a vain thing” (493). The psychological dynamic within Lucy's mind takes the form of a conflict between two antithetical writers. Imagination, an irresponsible romantic, produces narratives that magnify the desires and fears of the heart, transforming them into idols or “vain thing[s]” that engross the attention and eclipse God. Reason, an iconoclastic realist, scratches out these love stories, revising the narrative of Lucy's life into a tale characterized by deprivation and solitude. Lucy herself plays the role of a deeply ambivalent reader of the two conflicting versions of her life, yearning for the pleasures of the former even as she acknowledges the truth of the latter. Emphasizing that Lucy describes her narrative as “heretic,” the Greek root of which means “able to choose,” Patricia E. Johnson argues that Villette refuses in such instances to award priority to one story over another.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Johnson, this heretical resistence reveals Lucy's “attempt to be the author of herself” (617). The tragedy of the novel, however, one that Lucy herself repeatedly confronts, is that the plot of her life is written by the figure Noble calls the “great Author of all” (42). Lucy details the process through which her imagination concocts tantalizing love stories and admits that she is inclined to worship them, but she also deprives them of credibility.

The conflict that takes place within the mind of the protagonist is also written into the structure of the novel itself. Like Kingsley, Brontë encourages readers to invest their narrative desire in conventions she ultimately subverts. Elizabeth Gaskell first explained that Brontë had originally concluded the book with the certain death of M. Paul, but had then modified it because her father “was anxious that her new tale should end well, as he disliked novels which left a melancholy impression on the mind; and he requested her to make her hero and heroine . . . ‘marry, and live happily ever after’” (484).Footnote ²⁰ As a result, the fate of M. Paul remains technically uncertain, although the novel strongly suggests that he has died. Feminist critics have perceived in the novel's departure from the marriage plot a rejection of a patriarchal narrative (nicely symbolized by Patrick Brontë's literary preferences) that restricts the lives of women. Gilbert and Gubar, for example, argue that Villette “deflates male romanticism” in an ending that “reflects Lucy's ambivalence, her love for Paul and her recognition that it is only in his absence that she can exert herself fully to exercise her own powers” (438).Footnote ²¹ This compelling interpretation accounts for the fact that the story of Lucy's success as an independent business woman converges in the final chapter with the apparent loss of her lover. It does not attend to the spiritual significance of the conclusion, however, and thus exaggerates the degree of authority that Lucy attains. Brontë offsets her heroine's acquisition of socio-economic independence with events that demonstrate the extent to which mortal desire is tragically circumscribed by a higher power. The extent to which the ending of the novel is shadowed by divine authority makes it difficult to read it as the triumph of Lucy's “own powers.”

The final chapter of Villette is especially cruel in the way that it first nurtures and then withdraws the possibility of a romantic resolution. Lucy reveals that the letters she receives from M. Paul convey to her the “full-hearted plenitude” that she has always craved, that she has at last found a lover who is “faithful and thoughtful . . . tender and true” (494). In defiance of the plot to separate the lovers, she exclaims, “I love him now in another degree; he is more my own” (495). These expressions seem to prepare for the sort of conclusion that Jane Eyre furnishes; the period of separation seems to be only the final obstacle that the lovers will triumphantly surpass. In light of the Protestant discourse on idolatry, however, the text also includes troubling signs of excessive love. The very circumstances that dispel the power of “the Juggernaut” give rise to a benevolent idol that takes its place. Sustaining her life on letters from her distant fiancé, Lucy comes to perceive him as her “generous provider” (494), displacing the Christian god from the “seat he ought to occupy.” There is “no sham and no cheat” about M. Paul, Lucy insists, “no hollow unreal in him” (594). These phrases function in part to distinguish M. Paul from Graham, whose love is illusory, but they also suggest that her true lover has entered into a fateful competition with the supposedly true God. Declaring that M. Paul is no vain thing, no false idol, she implies that he is the reverse, a real god, worthy of worshipful devotion.

Following this implied heresy, an ominous note foreshadows divine retribution. After praising the letters she has received, Lucy asks, “was I grateful? God knows!” (494). She affirms that she was grateful – “to the death,” as she puts it – but the crucial point, to whom she directs her gratitude, remains unclear (494). “God knows!” indeed. Although this may appear to be splitting hairs, the Protestant discourse on idolatry breeds an acute sensitivity to the passionate jealousy of God.Footnote ²² The storms that coincide with M. Paul's return voyage draw on the long-standing Christian tradition of interpreting destructive weather as a sign of divine wrath.Footnote ²³ As M. Paul nears his destination, “the heavens are one flame . . . so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride” (495). The violent storm places Lucy in a scenario analogous to that endured by the hypothetical “watcher” in Shirley who cries for mercy to “the Invisible,” begging for the survival of the beloved idol (442). The narrator of the earlier novel anticipates the ending of Villette when she warns that “[n]ot always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail” (442).Footnote ²⁴ Lucy pleads, “God, watch that sail! Oh! Guard it!” but her appeal too late acknowledges the supremacy of the deity her love has offended, and the “destroying angel of tempest” accomplishes “his perfect work” (495). This language strongly suggests that M. Paul has fallen victim to a jealous Old Testament God who will suffer no rivals in the heart and soul of those under his charge.

The ending of Villette illustrates a more complex type of the “confrontational” ending that chastens readers too willing to “bow the knee” to visions of soul mates living happily ever after. In Yeast, Kingsley simply tells readers to stop fussing over the unconventional end of his novel and start confronting the idols they worship within. Brontë seems rather to placate disappointed readers with a soothing alternative designed to appeal to those with “sunny imaginations” (496). But even the sunniest minds must wince at the skeptical detachment with which the narrator treats the conventional resolutions of domestic fiction, “the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror,” etc. (496). Villette presents readers with an unpleasant choice of the sort that Lucy herself has been forced to make. They may accept the grim reality of an ending written by an offended God – or they may bow the knee to a hopeful vision concocted by the romantic imagination, a vain thing, a stone idol bereft of power. The novel thus cultivates in readers the sort of critical discernment that Lucy enacts in her trips to museums, where she finds happiness “not always in admiring, but in examining, questioning, and forming conclusions” (198). Encouraged to examine and question the alternatives presented at the end of Villette, they are led to form a conclusion that rejects the “impulse to fond idolatry” and acknowledges instead the tragedy endured by a heroine forced to submit to the decree of a jealous deity.

The broken marriage plots in Yeast and Villette reveal the effects of a fascinating clash between a Protestant religious principle and the conventional resolution of Victorian domestic fiction. This clash arises in various forms in other novels in which, as in Jane Eyre, the teleology of the marriage plot is strong enough to overcome religious scruples. Yeast and Villette provide intriguing counter-examples, novels in which concern about idolatrous love reaches an intensity that entirely derails the conventional resolution. By marking this extreme, they help us to measure the depth and force of an anxiety that runs beneath the surface of nineteenth-century Protestantism and its generally hearty acceptance of the heterosexual union. These novels suggest that if we hope to gain the richest possible view of Victorian culture and its artifacts, we must strive to take religion as seriously as the Victorians themselves, to understand its sub-currents as well as its main streams and to appreciate how they converge and intermingle with literary, political, and psychological concerns.