The Papist Represented by Geremy Carnes

Author:Geremy Carnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2012-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Catholics begin the conversion process by demonstrating the fallaciousness of how they are represented by Protestants. Representation, it seems, is critical to the maintenance of religious identity. In Religious Courtship, the minds of potential converts who enter Catholic territories are imposed upon by means of beautiful, pro-Catholic art; in The New Family Instructor, the grossly inaccurate representations of Catholics common in English culture endanger Protestants who step outside that culture’s boundaries.

Defoe’s most nuanced psychological exploration of this problem takes place in Roxana. Like the son who converts in The New Family Instructor, Roxana is susceptible to Catholic seduction because her Protestantism is little more than nominal and her disdain for Catholicism only concerned with superficialities. Like the merchant of Religious Courtship, she falls in love with the splendor of the Catholic world during her stay in it. These personal and external circumstances combine to produce in her an attraction to the Catholic religion.

The compromised nature of Roxana’s Protestantism is clearest at the very moment when she makes her most uncompromising declaration of it. Not long after her affair with the prince begins, she tells us that the “Devil . . . bade [her] go to any of the Romish clergy” and confess her adulterous relationship with him so as to either be comforted that her whoredom was not a sin, or to be absolved from it “upon the easiest Pennance” (104). She “had a strong Inclination to try” this method of easing her conscience, but she argues with herself,

that I could not be a Cheat in any thing that was esteem’d Sacred; that I could not be of one Opinion, and then pretend myself to be of another; nor could I go to Confession, who knew nothing of the Manner of it, and should betray myself to the Priest, to be a Hugonot, and then might come into Trouble; but, in short, tho’ I was a Whore, yet I was a Protestant Whore, and could not act as if I was Popish, upon any Account whatsoever. (104–5)

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