The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1

The Private Memoirsand Confessions

of a Justified Sinner 1

Outline

• Justified Sinner and the Gothic

• Justified Sinner and the reviewers

• The subversiveness of Justified Sinner

• Subversion and containment

JS and the Gothic

• JS (1824) a further contribution, after F, to the Gothic, ‘the literature of terror’, that has been popular in Britain from the 1760s on

• In this sense, JS a further expression of the un-derside of bourgeois rationality

• Gothic fiction offers a glimpse into a world that does not exist, as opposed to the one that does

• Hence the recurrent tension of relations between the Gothic and realism

JS and the Gothic

• JS a focus for the above tensions – presents the reader with a world that ap-pears stranger, more foreign than the one of everyday life

• The novel’s strangeness radiates out from the mysterious Gil-Martin, overwhelming in the process Robert Wringhim (the ‘justified sinner’ of the novel’s title)

JS and the Gothic

• The pattern observed in regard to F of a form of Gothic fiction bringing out the inner hostility of the critical establishment by its non-realist nature extends to the case of JS

• Note the hostile, critical nature of the first reviews of JH’s novel . . .

JS and the reviewers

• British Critic (July 1824) on JS: ‘uncouth and unpleasant’

• New Monthly Magazine (Nov. 1824) pro-nounced JS ‘extraordinary trash’

• Quarterly Theological Review (Dec. 1824) denied JS ‘one single attribute of a good and useful book’

• See also Westminster Review (Oct. 1824) . . .


• WR: ‘There are three good reasons for reading books: first to be instructed by them; secondly to be amused; and thirdly, to review them’

• WR: ‘The first [i.e. instruction] does not apply at all to the tale before us’

• WR: ‘as to the second [i.e. amusement], there are but few whose taste it will suit’


• WR: ‘the third [i.e. reviewing] carried us through with that proud consciousness of martyrdom for the public good, to which we are but too much accustomed when labouring in our vocation’

• WR: ‘The author has managed the tale very clumsily’


• Interestingly, the two hostile accounts of F and JS are strikingly similar in terms of their ideas about fiction, morality, and taste

• The above similarity reveals the dominant ideology of the reviewing press to be real-ist in character


• Hence the shared assumptions about the novel as a literary form that ought properly to be moral-educational, tastefully amus-ing, and orderly (linear, progressive nar-rative sequence, etc.)

• See in particular F ‘[a] Raw-head-and-bloody-bones’ and JS ‘The author has managed the tale very clumsily’


• The ‘wild’ misshapenness of Gothic fiction a particularly disturbing aspect of the genre

• Why? Because this wildness represents specific areas of novel-writing, from the 18C, that realism has not been able to transform and bring under its control into the 19C


• JS another ‘monstrous’ fiction• WR: ‘[we] regret that the author [of JS] did not

employ himself better than in uselessly and dis-gustingly abusing his imagination, to invent wick-ed tricks for a mongrel devil, and blasphemous lucubrations for an insane fanatic’ (emphases added)

• The idea of the monstrous pervades the critic’s whole discourse – Monstrous! Monstrous! Mon-strous!

The subversiveness of JS

• How is the disturbing ‘wild’ misshapenness of JS manifested?

• In other words, how is the subversiveness of JS as a work of fiction realized in rel-ation to realist rationality?

• NB the significantly hybrid nature of JH’s novel – the radical impurity of fiction in JH the source of its subversive edge


• JS a remarkably hybrid, as opposed to linear, form of fiction . . .

• . . . comprising the Editor’s narrative, the Confessions proper, the Editor’s postscript

• The above lack of a progressive narrative sequence (leading to a climactic ‘happy ending’) proves offensive to the principles on which realist consciousness rests


• In addition to considerations of form, hy-bridity is imaged in the text of JH’s novel through the different identities assumed by Gil-Martin

• . . . Gil-Martin, or Satan as shapeshifter• The shape(s) of Gil-Martin – JH’s strong-

est portrayal of hybridity’s inherent sub-versiveness in an otherwise well-ordered bourgeois world


• Satan’s shapeshifting in JS the equivalent of the monster’s assemblage from different body parts in F

• . . . Satan’s shapeshifting constitutes the very image of the monstrous in JH’s text

• Shifting shapes, assuming different iden-tities, appears the coefficient of Satan’s ability to operate as a force of evil


• Satan’s power of evil – a subversive threat to the realist world of commonplace reality

• The Westminster Review clearly tries to mini-mize the threatening nature of JH’s Satan by referring to him as ‘a mongrel devil’

• At the same time, the reviewer implicitly acknow-ledges that it is everything that is impure (‘mon-grel’) about Gil-Martin that makes him a troub-ling proposition

Subversion and containment

• But to what extent is it appropriate to des-cribe JS as a subversive novel?

• After all, in the genre war that is the Romantic novel there is no toppling of a dominant realism by a repressed Gothic – realism grows in strength as the 19C unfolds

• Perhaps JS represents a further case – like F – of ‘subversion and containment’


• NB JH’s aim as author is to be subversive in relation to Calvinist forms of belief

• In particular, the Calvinist notion of ‘the elect’ represented as being the work of the devil (Gil-Martin starts to appear in the narrative once Wringhim has been wel-comed into ‘the society of the just made perfect’ (p. 115))


• JH has evidently no subversive intentions vis-à-vis realism in fiction

• In fact, realist attitudes tend to be portray-ed sympathetically in JS by way of a point-ed contrast with everything that is shown as fanatical – i.e. unsympathetic – about Calvinism


• In all this Gil-Martin emerges as a figure who is both subversive and unsympathetic

• JS is that novel which stages an attack on the dangers of fanaticism and the extrem-ism of ‘the elect’ in the name of a more moderate doctrine of realism


• For instance, note how the George Col-wans and the Robert Wringhims are play-ed off against one another here as con-trasting pairs of characters

• It is evidently the former in this regard who are portrayed the more sympathetically

• What makes the Colwans sympathetic is their characteristic tendency, in their act-ions, not to go to extremes


• Like father like son: note how both George Colwans are ready to be conciliatory whenever disputes arise – a positive sign of the essential virtuousness of moder-ation

• Like father like son: both Robert Wring-hims, by contrast, epitomize the nastiness of extreme contentiousness


• Perhaps the younger Robert is the Calvin-ist minister’s illegitimate son after all

• . . . this suggestion is in keeping with the idea that Calvinism per se is seen as ill-egitimate – as the work of the devil – in JS

• The character who is moderate serves to define the nature of heroism in JH


• All of which is to say that, in JS, the George Colwans emerge as a version of the familiar middle-of-the-road hero pop-ularized in the WS Waverley Novels

• JH, as the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, has pre-viously been the discovery of WS who brings him to a wider audience


• WS’s influence on JH is evident in the valorization within JS of moderation as heroic

• The moderate, ordinary, level-headed George Colwans are realist heroes, as though straight out of the pages of WS’s fiction

• . . . the realist hero a quintessentially post-Napoleonic figure


• Curiously, then, there appears to be a consider-able amount of Gothic subversiveness about JS

• . . . a monstrously hybrid monster in MS re-appears in the form of Satan as shapeshifter in JH

• But the above subversiveness may be said to be contained in JS in light of the fact that JH’s fiction also compares with that of WS (via the attack on Jacobite extremism mounted in W)


• JS as an anti-extremist work of fiction exists in order to champion the historically new conception of moderation as heroic

• That this new conception comes from real-ism suggests, perhaps, that JH is best read as a fascinatingly non-realist but middle-of-the-road author

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1

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