Maria LaMonaca. Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0814210840. Price: US$44.95

Maria LaMonaca’s Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home represents a growing trend: a shift from studying anti-Catholic discourses on their own to studying Catholic and Protestant authors in dialogue with each other. Moreover, this study reflects an increased willingness to take seriously both religious literature and religion in literature. Here, LaMonaca trains her gaze on one of nineteenth-century religious literature’s most frequent preoccupations: the nature of domesticity and its relation to both this life and the next. As the introduction explains, “‘masked atheism’” refers to Catholicism—both Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic—but not in their actually existing forms. Instead, women writers used Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses to tackle “sacred cows” such as “popular constructions of domesticity, romantic love, matrimony, motherhood, and family” (3). According to LaMonaca, Protestants treated Catholicism as “masked atheism”—a term appropriated from the Irish anti-Catholic novelist and editor Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1)—because they saw it is a “fake religion” that panders to “a fallen human nature” (1). For Protestants, this stereotype of Catholicism made it eminently suitable for critiquing domesticity: where better to see “human nature” at its best and worst? For Catholic authors, by contrast, the option of a life of service outside marriage meant that any celebration of marriage as a be-all and end-all of human existence was subject to close investigation (15). The issue, then, is not whether authors got Catholicism “right,” but to what rhetorical use they put Catholic and anti-Catholic tropes. To anti-Catholic agitators, the confessional was one of Catholicism’s most dangerous spaces. In Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton (1844), however—written while the author was still an Anglican—only confession can save the novel’s protagonist from damnation. As a child, a furious Ellen accidentally killed her cousin, and the memory of this act blights her life. Her deathbed confession to a priest, however, enables her to reconcile herself to her husband and other relatives. By contrast, the famous confession scene in Brontë’s Villette (1853), which takes place inside a Catholic church, offers temporary appeal but no real succor. Only confessing to Paul Emmanuel brings Lucy true spiritual peace. Or does it? Analyzing the novel’s notoriously puzzling conclusion, and arguing that M. Paul cannot offer full “absolution” (92) either, LaMonaca suggests that the ending is “a divine condemnation for Lucy’s sin of idolatry” (93)—a sin committed in the very act of confessing to M. Paul. The first two chapters examined the fate of marriage and romance; the third explores what happens when novels do not merely critique romance, but instead omit it. LaMonaca focuses on the Anglo-Catholic Elizabeth Missing Sewell’s The Experience of Life (1852), which she reads in the context of fictional debates about convents and spinsters. Its heroine, Sarah Mortimer, enthusiastically renounces her own worldly desires. The list of renunciations includes marriage, a choice seconded by the unfortunate fates of the novel’s conventional couples: “In short, marriage and family life, far from being the natural vocation of every woman, might in fact prove a dangerous stumbling block to women’s moral, religious, and spiritual integrity” (120). The end result simultaneously suggests the inadequacy of proscribing marriage as a cure-all for female striving, and the potential problems involved in invoking endless self-sacrifice as a type of female liberation. The fourth chapter shifts from fiction to poetry. Noting the highly-vexed nature of Victorian debates about transubstantiation, LaMonaca suggests that for women writers, transubstantiation could, nevertheless, function as “a conceptual tool—and a means of authority—by which to unify the fragmented female self into physical and spiritual wholeness” (134). Thus, noting that all of the female characters in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) are associated with Catholicism, LaMonaca …