The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
style of ‘high’ fiction in which negative conversion narratives were characterised
by unresolved doubt. In these, characters despaired of salvation,
culminating in Joseph Conrad’s reversal of the salvation story in Heart
of Darkness (1902). 104 However, the experimental novel with an inverted
salvation narrative could not compete with the mass popularity of other
genres which depended upon the evangelical structure. Foremost among
these was the romantic novel, the most popular British novel form, which
owed its origins to evangelicalism. Walter Bagehot opined in 1858 that
romantic fiction was an ‘addiction’ of young readers, and ‘a kind of novel
has become so familiar to us as almost to engross the name, which deals
solely with the passion of love’. 105 For Victorian women writers, fiction
was almost inconceivable without romantic relationships between men and
women, even when exploring their anxieties, anger and ambivalence
concerning women’s subordinate position in British society. 106 Its secular
pinnacle was attained in the output of the Mills & Boon publishing house
which started in 1909, whose novels followed the evangelical narrative in
mixing the male public sphere and the female private sphere – not, as jay
Dixon argues, to subordinate and imprison women in inferior roles,
but by conflating them ‘to reaffirm the heroine’s world – her values and
expectations, her needs and way of life’. The shared characteristics include
the periods of tribulation and physical crisis which the man undergoes.
Mills & Boon novels employed notions of a journey, describing the
emotional and sometimes moral journey a hero must endure before ‘finding’
his heroine. By validating her world of home, romance and family, and by
the fusion of the hero and heroine in marriage as the final resolution, the
romantic novel is emphasising that the female sphere is necessary to the
public sphere. 107 This argument can be taken a little further. In the romantic
narrative the home becomes the place of feminine power to which men
become subordinate as the source – discursively the only source – of their
moral authority. Indeed, in Mills & Boon’s pre-1918 novels, religion is an
explicit element in the heroine’s romantic odyssey, and even after 1918
when explicit references to religion waned, love continues to be described
in terms of religious salvation: evangelical terminology continues to be used,
such as ‘cleansing’, ‘fallen so low’ and finding love as ‘the Promised land’. 108
Most fundamental of all, the Mills & Boon novel shares with the evangelical
narrative structure the absolute certainty of marriage as the final act of
the story.
One curious omission from secular fiction of the 1840–1940 period,
unlike evangelical literature, is the mother. Ermarth comments that in
historical and social novels they are ‘an especially endangered species’,
appearing as dead or ‘ghostly women’, often off-stage or characters previous
to the plot. 109 But this divergence was perhaps not surprising. The time
between puberty and marriage was the critical evangelical space for a
woman to be saved and find a ‘good man’. 110 Even in the evangelical
82