The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
the narrative is studied in terms of a series of oppositions which are, in
Eco’s words, ‘immediate and universal’. The oppositions can be permutated,
the interactions varied from story to story, but they form an invariant
structure of oppositions which breed a familiarity in the reader. In the
Bond novels, the oppositions are between Bond and the villain or the
woman, between the ideologies of democracy and totalitarianism or communism,
and a large number of relations between value-types such as
perversion–innocence, loyalty–disloyalty, chance–planning. These bipolarities
form in succession the narrative’s progress from its start point of
‘danger’ to its conclusion of ‘victory’ (Bond over villain, Bond with the
woman, the free world over communism/totalitarianism). These oppositions
in succession form the sequential structure of the story, what Eco
calls a succession of ‘play situations’ in which each move gives rise to a
countermove, propelling the story forward. 72 Eco identifies within the
story a series of oppositions which correspond closely to Foucault’s notions
of discourse in which ideal and anti-ideal exist in necessary conjunction.
These oppositional discourses emerge within the story in succession,
forming its episodes or narrative structure.
Eco’s methodology is highly relevant to the evangelical narrative. Indeed,
it is entirely possible to read the evangelical narrative structure as a common
thread linking popular religious and secular fiction of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Though it may have earlier origins (and was most
certainly popularised in Pilgrim’s Progress), it only became thoroughly
regular and repetitive in the nineteenth century and – most importantly –
assumed a dominant discursive role in popular culture. Whilst Frye may
be right in identifying the Bible as ‘the Great Code’ for narrative romance,
religious literature of the nineteenth century familiarised English-speaking
people (and very probably others) to the specifically ‘evangelical code’.
It was this code that established the appetite for the literary boom of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which almost universally used
that code, providing Britons with the primary format in which they learned,
explored and negotiated their own individual life destinies. The published
story was no mere invitation to self-conception; it was an injunction to do
so. The life-story, including the obituary, was a guide to behaviour: ‘What
a hint is this’, said one magazine in 1848 at the end of a story, ‘to pious
young women, whose husbands are not religious!’ 73 Within the lifestory
were located the issues of life destiny which each person was
compelled to negotiate, placing piety within personal narrative. Stories were
consequently vital to the conception of religiosity in Britain in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
The stories contained vital variations in how religiosity was conceived.
The vital, primary variation was that between women and men. Just as
discourses on male and female piety varied, so the evangelical narrative in
which they were located varied. Both the female discourse and the female
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