The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
angel in the house’ than the Victorian middle-class woman, and ironically<br />
freer from the greater domestic confinement <strong>of</strong> the 1950s servantless middle<br />
class. 114 In this way, whilst Mrs Miniver still acted as a cipher for Victorian<br />
domestic ideology, yet she had greater freedoms and more democratic inclinations.<br />
Marriage sustained romance and her sexually attractive qualities;<br />
for her ‘the most important thing about marriage was not a home or<br />
children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye<br />
to catch’. 115 Nonetheless, Mrs Miniver was not secularised. In the film<br />
especially, churchianity has a central moral and community place in the<br />
social fabric, with Sunday worship in the Anglican parish church displaying<br />
the social hierarchy (<strong>of</strong> boxed pew for the aristocracy, front seats for<br />
the middle-class Minivers, and rear pews for the servant class), and the<br />
venue for romantic liaison between the Miniver boy and the aristocrat’s<br />
daughter. News <strong>of</strong> the declaration <strong>of</strong> war comes – as it did for many <strong>of</strong><br />
<strong>Britain</strong>’s churchgoers on Sunday, 3 September 1939 – in mid-worship.<br />
As Alison Light observes, the novel is ‘a fantastic, fictional resolution <strong>of</strong><br />
anxiety’ for the English middle-class woman <strong>of</strong> the 1930s, 116 but the film<br />
unites this fable <strong>of</strong> domestic romance with Mrs Miniver’s quiet heroism in<br />
capturing a crashed German pilot. Perhaps unrealistically, Mrs Miniver<br />
in the film has no apparent wartime duties, so her incursion into ‘manly’<br />
bravery is transitory and not a transformation <strong>of</strong> woman’s role away from<br />
domesticity.<br />
Mrs Miniver’s diary in <strong>The</strong> Times was matched by Patience Strong’s<br />
‘Quiet Corner’ in the Daily Mirror for expounding the role <strong>of</strong> home life<br />
as central to personal and spiritual well-being. <strong>The</strong> fad for domestic<br />
self-satisfaction was even the object <strong>of</strong> satire in a ‘Contentment Column’<br />
in a Graham Greene-inspired weekly magazine in which the British home<br />
was caricatured as ‘full <strong>of</strong> sanctity and lethargy’. 117 Though a consciously<br />
class-based depiction <strong>of</strong> British life, this literature and film <strong>of</strong> the 1930s<br />
and early 1940s took an evangelical narrative shorn <strong>of</strong> sin – its threat, let<br />
alone its contemplation – and placed the angel in a house <strong>of</strong> serenity and<br />
goodness. <strong>The</strong> central moral coda <strong>of</strong> the evangelical narrative not only<br />
remained untouched, but was reinvigorated by the loss <strong>of</strong> ‘sin’ and depiction<br />
<strong>of</strong> manly temptation. <strong>The</strong> secular variant <strong>of</strong> the evangelical story was<br />
shutting its eyes to sin; with the prohibition and anti-gambling campaigns<br />
losing their arguments in the 1930s, the domestic story left the woman<br />
presiding over a house where moderation in drink, wagering and enjoyment<br />
was entirely consonant with domestic bliss.<br />
By the 1930s and 1940s, a rift had developed in the portrayal <strong>of</strong> women<br />
between the evangelical narrative <strong>of</strong> traditional religious literature and the<br />
secular narrative <strong>of</strong> popular literature for girls and women <strong>The</strong> secular<br />
narrative was showing less and less interest in overt religion, and notably<br />
conversionism which all but disappeared. This may be explained in large<br />
part by the decline <strong>of</strong> specifically evangelical Protestantism, marked by<br />
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