I am currently finishing up my PhD in English at the University of Toronto, specializing in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British literature and the intersections between literature and religion. My thesis explores representations of religious doubt in women’s writing, with a view to understanding the relationship between doubt and literary form.
The concerns of my project are particularly relevant today, as our culture struggles to come to terms with the fact that secularization has not unfolded in quite the way the Victorians themselves expected. Being more attuned to the complex ways in which faith and doubt operate in Victorian literature helps us to recognize, understand and engage the range of religious experience and commitment in our own time.
My SmallTalks:
1. Series: Victorian (Dis)belief and its Literary Forms
This series would be made up of three talks, each delivered so that audience members could still grasp the content and significance without needing to attend all three talks. Together, these talks cover several key critical interventions that my current research makes in literary scholarship on the Victorian period as an “age of doubt.”
Part 1: Nineteenth-century (de)conversion and its narrative forms
This opening talk sets out what became (and remains) a recognizable narrative shape for the loss of religious shape to take in nineteenth century England: the (male) undergraduate student encounters new ways of thinking at university that challenge their Christian beliefs, experience a crisis of faith, and become atheist or agnostic (a term coined later in the nineteenth century). This crisis-of-faith paradigm draws on the Christian tradition of conversion narrative: even as it reverses the direction of the movement, from belief to disbelief, the energies that structure the deconversion remain linear, moving from a state of certainty (belief) to a crisis-point of doubt to a new and different state of certainty (disbelief). In this talk I discuss the main pressure points on religious belief in the Victorian period, including Darwin’s evolutionary theory and increased interest in the historical Jesus, and consider how literature of the period sought to respond to the newly forming secular society, contextualizing this time of upheaval in relation to our own social context.
Part 2: Doubtful Women: Rethinking the Faith/Doubt Binary
In this second talk, I emphasize the gendered assumptions of the standard (de)conversion narrative which formed the focus of Part 1. If Victorian society—and literature—understood women as bastions of religious certainty, enjoying a serene and simple faith (this is why women in the period are so often figured as the “angel in the house”), then where does the doubting woman fit? Even as women experienced the secularizing pressures of the age, they did so in very different contexts than their male counterparts—after all, they couldn’t encounter radical thinking at Oxford, since they were banned from higher education. As I argue, this makes women’s experiences of doubt and their literary representations of doubt less likely to conform to the generic conventions of the (de)conversion narrative, and compels us to rethink the faith/doubt binaries that continue to structure our understanding of religious (dis)belief. While I draw on a broad range of examples, I will focus my discussion on the ways this plays out in one of the most successful novels of the period, Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere. [Like most other Victorian novels, this one is staggering in its length, so only selections would be recommended for pre-reading.]
Part 3: New Forms of Doubt: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm
Olive Schreiner, a highly influential feminist, social commentator and novelist born in South Africa and raised by missionary parents who split her adult life between South Africa and England, provides an excellent case-study for understanding how women writers in the nineteenth century used the space of fiction to imagine alternatives to the crisis-of-faith paradigm and the linear plot of (de)conversion narrative. Schreiner’s wildly successful experimental novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), challenges these conventions in myriad ways, from her use of a first-person plural narrator, to her confused chronology, to her emphasis on the uncertainty that continues to destabilize her characters’ beliefs even after they lose the faith of their childhoods. Written and set in the former Cape Colony, Schreiner’s novel offers a geographic distance that pulls into focus some of the particularities of the Victorian period and its preoccupations with doubt, and imagines new forms (dis)belief might take in a secular sphere.
2. Reimagining the Faith/Doubt Binary – This talk would offer a condensed version of the series outlined above, providing an overview of the ways in which a variety of women writing in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries imagine modes of religious belief and disbelief that go beyond the faith/doubt binary. For many women writers, including George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Olive Schreiner, Alice Meynell, and Christina Rossetti, the literary text offered particularly rich opportunities as a space in which to explore and interrogate forms of faith and doubt—including faith in doubt and doubt in faith—in an increasingly secular and pluralistic historical context. My talk concludes by considering the parallels between Victorian secularism and our own, illuminating the ways in which these writers challenge simplistic understandings of faith, doubt, (un)certainty and what it means to hold beliefs.
3. Forgotten Feminists – In this talk, I introduce some of the important early voices in the feminist movements that stretched between the 1850s and the Second World War that have since been forgotten (potential figures might include Olive Schreiner, Vera Brittain, Christina Rossetti and Dr. Marie Carmichael Stopes, among others). Paying particular attention to the intellectual diversity of these early feminists, who had strong and sometimes surprising convictions about issues ranging from the vivisection of animals to eugenics to the admittance of women to the army, I suggest that these women might have been forgotten or overlooked, despite having played significant roles in the development of feminist thought, because they do not always neatly fit within our twenty-first century notions of feminism, especially as feminism continues to struggle to privilege unity without devaluing diversity and difference—witness recent controversy over Margaret Atwood’s “bad feminism.” Besides enriching our understanding of feminism as a historical movement, remembering these forgotten feminists expands our idea of what feminism might mean.
This talk could also be offered in an expanded three-part series, with each part focusing on the biography, thoughts and writings of one forgotten feminist. The following early feminists, whose periods of involvement range from the 1880s to WWII, would offer a productive trajectory, as they respond to each other’s ideas:
Part 1: Overview and Olive Schreiner (focus on Women and Labour)
Part 2: Dr. Marie Carmichael Stopes (focus on sex manuals)
Part 3: Vera Brittain (focus on Testament of Youth)
4. Pet Poetry – This talk considers one of the more obscure genres of our literary heritage: poetry devoted to pets. The nineteenth century marks a radical shift in the domestication of animals, away from considering domestic animals as property and livestock to be managed for labour and transport (horses), food production (cattle, pigs) and textiles (sheep), toward the potential for emotional attachments between humans and animals, as pets. Poetry on pets—especially on mourning the loss of a favourite pet—abounds in the late nineteenth century; this talk provides an overview of the trend, and examines in detail some of the more remarkable instances. Katharine Harris Bradley and her lover and niece Edith Emma Cooper—themselves a remarkable pair who published jointly authored poetry under the pseudonym “Michael Field”—wrote a full collection of poems on their beloved dog Whym Chow, who they variously imagined as the third member of their household “Trinity” and compared to Greek gods. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and a celebrated painter and poet, commemorated his favourite pet, a wombat named Top, in image and verse (ultimately he found the Canadian woodchuck to be more adaptable to the English climate than the short-lived Australian wombat). Through these and other examples, I consider the ways in which the Victorians used pet poetry to think through and re-envision their relationship to the natural world. Should audience members be inspired to poeticize on their own pets, this would naturally be encouraged!
5. Why Read Novels – This talk takes up the claim that reading novels builds empathy, a theory that gained traction in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of the realist novel, and that has more recently been the focus of neurological studies that seek to measure the impact of reading using brain scan technology. The particular claims of realism as a genre that creates empathy in the reader depends on its realistic representation of the inner life of another, that the reader imaginately accesses, practicing emotional skills in the world of the novel that they can export to the real world. Taking as a case-study the work of George Eliot (Marianne Evans), the most significant and influential novelist of the nineteenth century, I explore the potential—and the limits—of reading as a means of building empathy.
6. Custom SmallTalks – please contact me if I can develop an interesting educational experience for you and your guests in one of my areas of expertise:
- Victorian literature
- Literature by women
- Early 20th century literature
- Jazz-age literature (Masters specialization)
- Religion and literature, secularization and the post-secular
- Reading poetry / why read poetry in the 21st century / how to recite poetry
Where I Can Go:
Within the GTA; surrounding cities if additional funding is provided for travel costs.
Availability:
I am generally available weekdays and weekends for the foreseeable future. I will be unavailable Tuesday and Thursday evenings May 1, 2018 – June 30, 2018, and July 1 – 14, 2018.
Languages:
My SmallTalks can be delivered in English.
Fees:
My SmallTalks usually last 45 minutes, followed by up to 45 minutes of discussion. I am happy to provide suggested pre- and post-reading for your group.
Fee: $300 (negotiable—I am happy to offer a lower fee for smaller groups)