“A Sacramental Moment”: Liturgy and Time in the Victorian Reception of the Past Restricted; Files Only

Adamson, Christopher (Summer 2020)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/v118rf52c?locale=en
Published

Abstract

What is time? Following Boethius, Chaucer contrasts time with an eternity understood as the “perfect possession of interminable life.” In Hardy’s poetic cosmos, time is a monster that reduces everything to dust and “devour[s] our prime.” Subjective experience of time can be one of drudgery and antagonism, an inescapable phenomenon that always seems inferior to an imagined eternity. When reading these same authors with the insights of liturgical theology, however, we find that time is the medium of encounter composed of George Eliot’s “sacramental moment[s]” where characters and readers are invited to greet the human other with love.

My interpretive framework draws out theological implications contained in liturgical allusion. Often, we read liturgical allusions as giving a sense of the sacred, profaning the sacred in a subversive way, or merely reminding the reader of religious practice for an affective purpose. Each of these readings is accurate and productive, but I propose that we read more deeply by turning toward the underlying ritual purpose that enables these other readings. When a poet incorporates a liturgical echo into a text, whether as a parody or straightforward allusion, the function of that liturgy and its temporal assumptions influence the text.

This dissertation examines the importance of ritual in the Victorian reception of the medieval past. Specifically, I focus on how the Victorian obsession with liturgical structures and objects for literary purposes reveals the nature of their view of time. I examine liturgical usage in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Thomas Hardy’s poetry and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I begin with a chapter presenting Chaucer as a medieval model of liturgical time that endures through the Victorians, and end questioning how the central purpose of a liturgy (communion with the divine other through a human community) both remains consistent and changes through use by secular Victorian writers. Understanding the use of liturgical forms in Victorian texts enables a more nuanced view of literature than the secularization narrative provides and informs the way we currently receive the Victorian past or wield medieval discourses ourselves.

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1

“A Sacramental Moment”: Inhabiting the Liturgical Turn 

Part I .......................................................................................................................................... 29

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: Relating the Law of Prayer to the Law of Belief 

 

Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................................ 30

The Carnivalesque Power of Pagan Rites in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde 

 

Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................ 85

The Cosmic Maid and Mother in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poetry and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles 

 

Part II ...................................................................................................................................... 139

Lex Vivendi: The Law of Right Living 

 

Chapter 3 .............................................................................................................................. 140

The Eternal Process of Burying God: Thomas Hardy’s Anatheistic Poetry 

 

Chapter 4 .............................................................................................................................. 173

Encountering the Other through Sacramental Moments in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 

 

Part III ..................................................................................................................................... 206

Lex Pulchritudinis: The Law of Beauty 

 

Coda ..................................................................................................................................... 207

“After, After”: The Future Communion of a Liturgical Literary Studies 

 

Glossary .................................................................................................................................. 224 

 

Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 226 

 

 List of Tables and Figures 

  

Figure 1 ..................................................................................................................................... 20

Messianic and Liturgical Time 

 

Figure 2 ..................................................................................................................................... 32

The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry by Ford Madox Brown 

 

Table 1 ...................................................................................................................................... 36

Comparison of Sarum Missal to Liturgical Echoes in Troilus and Criseyde. 

About this Dissertation

Rights statement
  • Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.
School
Department
Degree
Submission
Language
  • English
Research Field
Keyword
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor
Committee Members
Last modified Preview image embargoed

Primary PDF

Supplemental Files