Abstract
Kelsey L. Bennett’s Principle and Propensity: Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman begins with a seemingly simple observation that turns out to have a revolutionary impact on literary studies. Namely, Bennett points out the fact that within Christian religious traditions the “idea of Bild appears at the source of identity in its metaphysical dimensions” (3). The appearance of humans in Genesis, in other words, is organized around the replication of God’s image, or, in German, Bild. Thus Luther’s translation of Genesis 1:26–27—“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness … So God created man in his own image”—reads “Und Gott sprach: Lasset uns Menschen Machen, ein Bild, das un gleich sei … Und Gott schuf den Menschen ihm zum Bilde,” collapsing the distinction between “image” and “likeness” through the use of that single word (3–4). Made in the image of the divine, now fallen humans struggle to regain that likeness; in many Christian traditions, access to the lost image is achieved only through Christ. Human progress, in this framework, is a spiritual striving delineated toward an original, divine image. Bennett’s reminder about the religious origins of Bild and the oft-forgotten link it creates between human and godly pursuits has startling consequences for the study of the Bildungsroman. Typically considered a secular form confined mainly to the European continent, a model of self-formation separate from religious concerns, the Bildungsroman carries in its very name the trace of that Genesis moment. Drawing out the spiritual longing at play in this notion of Bild, Bennett reorients discussion of this genre, assessing its ties to religious movements and considering it beyond the borders of Europe and its Goethean tradition.
Principle and Propensity reconsiders the Bildungsroman primarily by linking it to three distinct Protestant traditions operating in three different locales: English Methodism, American Calvinism, and German Pietism. The book’s first section is comprised of chapters addressing the main parameters of each of these movements and explaining their respective relationships to the concepts of spiritual progress, self-formation, and the struggle to regain the ideal image of God. Individually, these chapters offer a wealth of information about these complex traditions, and their clarity will make them useful not only to readers of this journal but also to students seeking a better understanding of the revivalist movements of the period. The first chapter, which addresses John Wesley’s “Spiritual Empiricism,” traces the development of Methodism in England from the 17th century forward, offering an invaluable history even as it also specifically addresses how Methodism emphasized a plan of Christian self-formation. As Bennett shows through beautiful readings of Wesley’s autobiographical writings and his “Plain Account of Christian Perfection,” Methodism emphasized the importance of earthly experience to human reclamation of the original divine image. Contrasted with Wesley’s rather optimistic approach to the worldly possibilities of grace is Edwards’s “ontological inwardness, or lifelong antinomian preoccupation with the condition of the soul” (34). In Edwards, Bennett identifies a notion of “spiritual self-formation as a complex interaction between the soul’s fixed eternal state and its temporal experiential growth” (35). The paradox, for Edwards, is that spiritual striving only can take place within the human body that precludes the possibility of total success. The third chapter in this section situates the Ur-Bildungsroman, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, within the context of Zinzendorf’s theological innovations, particularly reconsidering the book in light of Pietism’s emphasis on religious affection. Carefully tracing the specific stakes of each of these movements, Bennett shows that despite their often oppositional positions on particular issues of theology, at the heart of each lay a sense that human spiritual self-formation was indelibly linked to the pursuit of the image of God.
Having established a religious framework within which to reassess the bildungsroman, Bennett shifts, in her book’s second section, to offering readings of English and American novels that highlight some of the genre’s theological and spiritual investments. Through readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Pierre, and The Portrait of a Lady, Bennett highlights the connections between these works’ presentations of self-formation and the evangelical conversion narratives that she addressed in the book’s first section. The chapter on Jane Eyre is especially useful, not only because it gives attention to the oft-elided St. John Rivers but also because it provides a brief but clear history of shifts in English Methodism from its origins to the 19th century. Focusing on the novel’s preoccupation with action and work, Bennett aptly links its presentation of self-fashioning to the Arminian currents running through the period’s Christian evangelism. In particular, the chapter explores the Wesleyan notion of “natural affections” and Jane’s will to “enjoy [her] own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people” (68). Spiritual work, in this case, is inseparable from work in the world. Arminianism, Bennett contends, is equally if differently at play in the works of Charles Dickens. Her chapter on David Copperfield assesses how Dickens “stretches Arminianism to its empirical limits, beyond which loom purely utilitarian modes of conduct” (85). Through assessment of these very different literary approaches to the project of self-formation, Bennett shows how Methodism’s legacy extends to novels that are not obviously engaged with its theological questions. The self-formation at play in these works is not always explicitly a spiritual self, but its concern with the role of works in moral development is Arminian to its core.
In the American Bildungsroman, Bennett finds a fraught antinomianism at the heart of the genre. Reading Melville’s Pierre, a novel that likely emerged out of Melville’s reading of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Bennett shows how the text subverts the conventional order of the story of self-formation. Pierre moves from country to city, like many protagonists of the genre, and he strives toward a life that matches his ideals. The result of his efforts, however, is annihilation rather than self-making. Linking the novel both to Goethe’s work and the antinomian paradox that underlies Edwards’s theology, Bennett shows how Melville harnesses the conventions of the Bildungsroman to present a story that tracks in a nearly oppositional direction. Turning to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Bennett identifies a similar but perhaps less nihilist antinomian strain in Isabel Archer, whose path to self-formation is an interior one, a development of a kind of spiritual condition that exists apart from the workings of the world. Where the English novels considered are concerned with the achievement or reclamation of Bild through a project of works, these American texts inhabit the same paradox with which Edwards grappled: the self in grace is both always and never free from the demands of the world and thus always engaged in formation at the edge of annihilation.
Principle and Propensity is an important study that contributes to a broader, ongoing discussion about the role of religion in 19th-century literary texts. More and more, the ostensibly “secular” properties of literary works are revealed to have roots in religious reading practices, theological debates, and spiritual concerns. The connections Bennett draws between the novels in question and the specific religious theories that underpin them are insightful and aptly demonstrated. This book’s attention to the theological particulars and historical trajectories of Methodism, Pietism, and Calvinism makes it a valuable resource and a good model for any scholar wishing to move beyond generalities about “Protestantism” or “Christianity.” I did at times feel that Bennett’s alignment of religious traditions with national spaces was too neat. Beliefs, like literary forms, travel and transmute all the time. There is, to give one obvious example, a vibrant Methodist culture at work in much of the literature of the 19th-century United States. Bennett’s book raises but does not fully answer the question of how American Methodism might have shaped the Bildungsroman differently than did its English counterpart. In a similar vein, the book’s narrow scope allows Bennett to offer deep, convincing readings of her chosen novels, but it also leaves the reader wondering if they are representative of a larger body of literature or outliers within their respective traditions. Upon finishing this book, I was thoroughly convinced that a strong current of Protestant religiosity runs in a variety of ways through the Bildungsroman form; I remained less convinced that said form is as operant in British and American contexts as in a European one. The sample offered in Principle and Propensity is simply too small to make that case. But this is a mere quibble. What Bennett has achieved is a reorienting of the discussion of a genre that often is ignored in English literary studies and a faith tradition that frequently is pushed to the margins of inquiry. The result is a clearly argued and well-detailed book that will be of great use to scholars focusing on either side of the Atlantic and is sure to invite more discussion of its subject.