"Janet's Repentance" IV (chaps. 15-21) SCENES of CLERICAL LIFE (Oct. 1857)

Dear Serial Reader/s,

I'm on a mission--these stories deserve more serious notice than they've received! I have one comment on this episode of this "Scene"/story, and then another on a way to read these "Scenes" as interlocking.

First, on the scene between Tryan and Janet. I once wrote a book on confession in Victorian literature, and I wish I'd included this remarkable scene. When Janet confesses "how weak and wicked" she feels for her sin of drinking (seems a bit harsh on herself, given that her husband drinks excessively and beats her and locks her outside in the middle of the cold night, but never mind) to Tryan, this Evangelical, renegade preacher responds with a confession of his own sin--his great guilt for indirectly causing a young woman's death. Eliot demonstrates that much more than doctrinal belief, true religion is human compassion, not just sympathy or pity, but deeply hearing and understanding another's suffering, sometimes through connection with one's own. Tryan is a remarkable confessor because of the mutuality which his sympathy means--"sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession." I can think of many confession scenes in other Eliot novels (such as Gwendolen to Deronda) and cannot recall a single instance of this response of confession to confession. It seems clear that redemption and salvation come through human connection first, not some dry religious creed. The story Tryan tells about Lucy reminded me of Gaskell's earlier seduction stories (Esther Barton, even Mary Barton and Carson, and Ruth), only this time from the perspective of the genuinely reformed seducer (unlike Ruth's Bellingham).

Second, it occurs to me that we might link together each clergyman of the "Scenes" and see a kind of evolution here, from the very ordinary Amos Barton who does his job in a perfunctory way, but nothing remarkable. Perhaps all those young children and wife and the countess distract his attention outward. Then we have Maynard Gilfil, who is a good enough vicar, even if he doesn't seem to live up to the most doctrinal principles. We learn he has a good heart, by going back through the story of his own heart. Yet it is this third clegyman, the "meddlesome, upstart, Jacobinical fellow" (according to Lawyer Dempster), who displays the greatest power of ministering to a sufferer. This is also the only story of the three where the minister's name isn't in the title, but instead the woman who turns to him out of desperation.

While I think that it's "Janet's Repentance" that typically has received the most attention as the best of the three "Scenes," I'd like to suggest that we could even see Tryan as the culmination of the serial ministers, and perhaps Janet as the composite of the women linked to them. In any case this story of a battered wife and a ridiculed Evangelical preacher who "gets" what human suffering means is quite remarkable to me. And I wonder if Eliot is recommending celibacy for her clergymen--or recovered celibacy at least. It seems to me that the most powerfully compassionate religious men are not married--Farebrother in Middlemarch, say, or even Savonarola in Romola, and Dr. Kenn at the end of The Mill on the Floss is recently widowed.

If anyone reading this knows of good scholarship on this series of stories, please tell me!

Next week: the final installment of "Janet's Repentance" (chaps. 22-28). There's more suspense, I find, at the end of each of these installments (or maybe the suspense builds from the earlier stories to this one). Now the final suspense: is Janet going to be delivered through Dempster's timely death or will he survive and she return to him? Tune in for the finale!

The week after next: Martin Chuzzlewit!

Serially sympathizing,
Susan