This article considers Mark Twain’s 1896 novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in the context of his earlier satirical treatment of nineteenth-century Sunday school books. Though often classified as an anomaly among Twain’s works, Joan of Arc in fact proves perfectly consistent with the author’s most pointed critiques of the moral and religious training of children. Close analysis of Twain’s earlier works on children illuminates his presentation of his ideal child and ideal human Joan. Twain’s novel makes clear that Joan’s virtue is not the result of the type of behavioral training operant in nineteenth-century Sunday school books. By highlighting Joan’s selflessness and emphasizing that she is not motivated by rewards or punishments, Twain distinguishes her from self-seeking Sunday school book heroes and heroines. And by telling the true story of her persecutions, sufferings, and martyrdom, his narrative completely inverts the pattern of the Sunday school books in which “good” children are always abundantly rewarded and “bad” children are always dreadfully punished. Joan remains untouched by the corrupt values of her society because of her moral conviction, courage, and immunity to both threatened punishments and promised rewards. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is not, as some have argued, a sentimental departure from Twain’s lifelong pattern of criticizing the social and religious training of children. In Joan, Twain finds a heroine who subverts Sunday school book standards of “goodness” and in the process achieves true virtue.

This essay reads Raphael, the principal expositor of scientific knowledge in Milton’s Paradise Lost, as embodying divergent, virtually antithetical, dispositions towards the prospect of free engagement with natural philosophy within the public sphere. At once stimulating Adam’s curiosity about the natural world while also overzealously curtailing the range of human inquiry, Raphael inadvertently primes Adam and Eve to fall for Satan’s sophistry by advancing undue restrictions in excess of his divine mandate. In doing so, Raphael’s pedagogy conveys the uncertainty experienced by Milton and many of his more anxious contemporaries regarding the precise manner by which one should best navigate scientific discussion within a burgeoning public sphere. Raphael’s dual functions create a dialectic of restrained scientific inquiry that, in the absence of a definitive model for a religiously-informed science predicated on free inquiry, thus constitutes that most Miltonic of paradoxes: the advocacy of investigative liberty superintended by an elite few.

The gods in C. S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces are often supposed to represent the God of Christianity, yet Lewis’s nonfiction suggests that the gods, Ungit and her son the Shadowbrute, should be understood as Venus and Eros, who represent the sex act and romantic attraction, respectively. Throughout the novel, the narrator, Orual, struggles against both sexuality and romantic attraction, and therefore against both deities. By the end of the novel, Orual has reconciled with her sister Psyche as well as with the god Eros. Although there are parallels between Orual’s final visions of Eros and Christian visions of God, the details of the novel tend to undercut the Christian typology that readers have come to expect from Lewis’s fiction.

Although George Eliot only once explicitly references the myth of Cupid and Psyche in Adam Bede, the rest of the novel frequently alludes to the myth, specifically with reference to Hetty Sorrel and her relationship with Arthur Donnithorne. In fact, this myth provides an instructional framework for reading and interpreting Hetty Sorrel’s moral development. The parallel between Hetty and the myth of Psyche, which can be read as an allegory for the moral transformation of the human soul, is noteworthy: what is Eliot trying to accomplish when she compares the grand, mythological development of the human Psyche to Hetty Sorrel’s “little trivial soul?” I will argue that the mythologizing of Hetty’s story serves two purposes. First, it reveals a discrepancy between Hetty’s idealized dream world and the reality of her life. Second, it is when her mythologized dream world is shattered that her life paradoxically begins to mirror the Psyche myth: just as in the Psyche myth, Hetty’s soul grows through trial and suffering. The transformation of the soul, says Eliot, takes many forms and happens in unexpected places and ways. In fact, the sufferings of trivial souls are worthy of recognition even if they achieve only the smallest growth.

This essay discusses George Herbert’s treatment of the good of works in his poetry and prose. I first consider the position of the early modern Church of England on good works and then turn to Herbert’s imagining of sanctification as the natural efflorescence of justification across a selection of his Latin and English lyrics. Next I suggest that The Temple and The Country Parson are twin books that make up Herbert’s vision of the complete Christian, justified and undergoing sanctification. If The Temple forms a map with justification as the collection’s destination, then The Country Parson is a work of “practical piety” with the process of sanctification, the enacting of good works by a justified sinner, as its principal goal. Through these complementary works Herbert projects an ambitious spiritual program, commencing in the justification of the human heart and subsequently evolving into the dispersal of holiness, charity, and good works in the world.

One of James Joyce’s best-known tendencies as a writer of fiction is his avoidance of anything like authorial intrusion. As his best biographer, Richard Ellmann, puts it: “Joyce never insists.” This choice could have presented a problem for him in writing Dubliners, for he intended that collection of stories to be a moral exposé of the “dear, dirty Dublin” that he had fled. A main means of his satisfying both desires is what this essay identifies as “doubling.” Time after time, Joyce gives characters descriptions, mannerisms, modes of speaking, etc., that duplicate those of another character in another story. Simultaneously, he puts characters into similar situations, sometimes facing common dilemmas. Differences in their ways of responding to their crises nudge the reader—who is often predisposed by Joyce’s mnemonic devices—into the moral judgments that Joyce almost certainly hoped to instill.

This essay explains how D. H. Lawrence occupies an unusual place in 20th century ethical discourse—between Heidegger’s privileging of strength-in-aloneness and his ethics of “letting be,” and Levinas’ privileging of the experience of otherness as the fundamental moment of ontology. Lawrence’s rhetoric, especially in his essays, seems to advocate a Heideggerian ethical position; however, by examining The Rainbow and Women in Love, this essay demonstrates how Lawrence’s fiction pushed him towards the acknowledgement that otherness is the fundamental basis for ethics.

Through the juxtaposition of an image (in the prologue) of Christ in Mary’s womb with that (in the tale) of Almachius as a bladder full of hot air, The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale contributes to the theme in The Canterbury Tales of overcoming tyranny. While the nun’s tale alone presents an overly forceful apologetic, the image that Chaucer includes in her prologue subtly reminds audiences of a more paradoxical relationship between creator and creatures than that of either tyrant-and-subjects or tale-teller-and-audience-to-be-indoctrinated. Chaucer, if not so much the well-meaning nun, emulates the creator of freedom. So too does the tale-telling fellowship, which reveals Christ in its enduring togetherness, despite the attempts of individual tellers to have the last word.

This article discusses the presence of figures of thought in some well-known feminist essays by Virginia Woolf. The novelist and essayist was especially sensitive to the challenging situation of women throughout history as far as their personal and professional desire for equality in a male-centered society was concerned. Woolf tries to make readers aware of her feminist views by using expressive resources like figures of speech or schemes, tropes and figures of thought in her writing. Figures of thought can be defined as those specific gestures which are designed to interact with the audience. Their use is connected with the functional use of language in the sense that they may draw readers’ attention away from the textual content and toward the context. Since the essays chosen for this study were first read aloud or were written in the form of letters before being published, the appeal to audience may be more deliberate and thus effective. The figures analyzed are enallage of person, erotema, ecphonesis, prosopopeia, aposiopesis and prolepsis.

The Restoration poet Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) includes in her Poems on Several Occasions (1703) a short but important work, "Song: To Lerinda," that blends sacred and sexual love between two women. Better known to readers for her proto-feminist perspective in The Ladies Defense (1701), Chudleigh expresses outrage about the poor treatment of wives, though in this work she does not go so far as to suggest a same-sex union as an alternative to traditional marriage for women. Several shorter works in the Poems allude to unorthodox forms of spiritual or erotic experience for women, including "Song: To Lerinda," which, like the majority of her writing, demonstrates Chudleigh’s intellectual range and deep reading of classical philosophy. Willing to take risks in her poetry, Chudleigh re-imagines the Platonic homoerotic love ideal, which she revises to include women’s same-sex desire in the "Song." The imagined experience between the two women in the poem communicates an erotic and philosophical ideal of communal love that embraces rather than rejects physical pleasure as a means of accessing a higher spiritual realm. The love relationship between the women challenges hetero-normative social patterns, and the speaker suggests that same-sex desire is spiritually and sexually preferable for them.

Bernard Lonergan, SJ, has noted that an empty box does not know it is empty and does not care whether it is empty or full. An empty stomach, on the other hand, knows when it is empty and yearns for what will satisfy it. Flannery O’Connor’s stories present the reader with a parade of characters who are empty boxes in the process of becoming empty stomachs. William Lynch, SJ, said that many times such conversions result from stark encounters with the finite, thus accounting for the grotesque in O’Connor’s stories.

This article analyzes the emotional maturation of Louisa Gradgrind and Jane Eyre as they move from the extremes of repression and indulgence to expressive moderation. In comparing the emotional lives of the novels’ major and minor characters, it becomes clear that both stories ultimately endorse a Pauline ethic of anger – in stark contrast to the Victorian ideals of their time. In showing how Louisa and Jane navigated cultural mores to reach a place of healthy anger, these novels invite modern readers to do the same – to exercise similar discretion and righteous restraint to secure good and meaningful endings to their lives.

The article offers a new reading of the central portion of Wilde's famous prison letter, which I call the letter's "spiritual center." In this central section, Wilde contemplates his future and expresses his desire to start a new life, a Vita nuova. As he works to envision in writing a future that can integrate the suffering of his prison experience, he outlines a spiritual vision that is both startlingly original, and informed by varied religious traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, and the British Occultist movement. In this article, I provide a careful reading of the four tasks Wilde sets out for himself to serve as the foundation for his Vita nuova. In order to better understand the context for Wilde's spiritual writing, I also explore briefly the religious and spiritual influences of the author's life. I conclude with a consideration of the values which underlie Wilde's four tasks, and the spiritual portion of his letter in general; namely, individual self-realization, suffering, and acceptance. Taken together, my article's contextual study and attentive reading of De Profundis's spiritual center offer a new understanding of both Wilde's practical spirituality and the spiritual milieu of the fin-de-siècle.

Paul A. Lacey’s rich meditation on the importance of reading and re-reading offers sage perspective on Henry James’s The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady. Waxing wise on W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and A. E. Housman, Lacey’s essay provides a reason not to lose touch with the works we love to read and re-read.