Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House
Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House
Comparing Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand (1876) to Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of The House, or Underwode, Under Rode (1870–73), this chapter outlines how religion, form, and focalization interact in mid-Victorian Christian sentimental fiction to create discernible concepts of disability as corporealizing spirituality. Specifically, each author’s respective incarnational theology (the theology of Christ in human form) correlate substantially to the novels’ overarching narrative forms, Hopkins’s as a single-focus plot and Yonge’s as a multiple-focus plot. As a single-focus Bildungsroman that focalizes primarily through its heroine, Rose Turquand delineates spirituality and disability as individually experienced, depicting incarnation as the sanctification of the individual body through suffering. In contrast, The Pillars of the House’s multiple-focus family chronicle formulates religion and disability as communally experienced through interdependency as the locus for spiritual growth, reflecting Yonge’s Tractarian understanding of incarnation as existing through the Church as a community.
Keywords: Christian sentimental fiction, single-focus plot, multiple-focus plot, incarnation theology, Charlotte Yonge, Ellice Hopkins, The Pillars of the House, Rose Turquand
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