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Abstract
Set in 1912, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels (1990) registers cultural trends marking the early twentieth century as it engages and transforms its Victorian heritage. It does so particularly regarding two phenomena: the impact of science, centred on the shift from classical to modern physics, and the growth of secularism. By evoking a world of unexpectedness and chance, as suggested by the early stages of atomic theory and quantum mechanics, it holds open a gate for admission of the potentially extraordinary—in particular, a human capacity for self-transcendence and for mutual caring that both science and religion can be judged by their ability to promote or retard.
Notes
1 The The Gate of Angels (Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Offshore (Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 1998). In addition to the Booker Prize, Fitzgerald was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for her last novel, The Blue Flower (Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 1997), and the 1996 Heywood Hill Literary Prize for lifetime achievement.
2 Frank Kermode, introduction, The Bookshop, The The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald (New York: Everyman's-Knopf, 2003), xvi.
3 In re-imagining aspects of the Victorian world from contemporary literary and cultural perspectives, neo-Victorian novels generally make little distinction between Victorian times and those that immediately preceded and followed Queen Victoria's reign. The Gate of Angels engages the legacy of the Victorian era and its absorption and reformulation by the cultural-intellectual trends of a new century.
4 Christopher Knight characterises The Gate of Angels as an attempt ‘to work out the difficulties that any intelligent, religiously-inclined person must come to terms with when living’ in today's world (‘Concerning the Unpredictable: Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels and the Challenges to Modern Religious Belief,’ Religion and Literature 45.3 (2013): 48).
5 These qualities are suggested especially by the inclusion of a long ghost story involving diabolic nuns and of reference to the religious politics involved in the founding of St. Angelicus College. ‘The novel does not present a naïve view of faith,’ writes Martin Goldstein (‘Physics as a Metaphor in a Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, Revisited,’ APS News 10.2 (2001): 4, 2 July 2013 <http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200102/viewpoint.cfm>).
6 See John Glendening, Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels: Eye of the Ichthyosaur (New York: Routledge, 2013), 19–20.
7 Postsecularism posits that secularism has lost steam while religion is making a comeback—or that the secularist trend was never as strong and widespread as historians and cultural critics made it out to be.
8 Don Adams, Alternative Paradigms of Literary Realism (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
9 We learn that St. Angelicus ‘had no real existence at all, because its foundation had been confirmed by a pope … who had been declared not to be the Pope at all’ (17). Bruce Bawer says that ‘Fitzgerald is playing something of an ontological game with the reader’ (‘A Still, Small Voice: The Novels of Penelope Fitzgerald,’ The New Criterion 10 (1992): 17). Other critics have commented similarly.
10 Jean Sudrann, ‘“Magic or Miracles”: The Fallen World of Penelope Fitzgerald's Novels,’ Contemporary British Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Robert E. Hosmer, Jr. (New York: St. Martin's, 1993), 105.
11 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage-Random, 1989), 243, 245.
12 ‘The conflict between faith and rationality in 1912, the age of Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, and Max Planck, provides a backdrop (in The Gate of Angels) against which Fitzgerald builds a meditation on the extent to which luck and chance or grace operate in our lives' (Tess Lewis, ‘Between Head & Heart: Penelope Fitzgerald's Novels,’ The New Criterion 18 [2000]: 34).
13 Dr. Mathews mentions the ‘unexpected dangers' of mechanization; 2 years after the novel is set these will become manifest in WWI, which Kelly predicts (50, 95).
14 The character Skippey alludes to the ‘Fitzgerald-Lorenz [sic] contradictions' (151), which involve another overturning of traditional science. The ‘Fitzgerald’ here might suggest self-reflexivity and, in her novel, Penelope Fitzgerald's disruptions of conventional understandings.
15 Peter Wolfe, Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 246. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 132–4.
16 Regarding the name ‘Mach,’ Fitzgerald describes an associative compositional approach that suggests why her fiction often seems at once designed and improvisational. She had witnessed a scene similar to the initial one in The Gate of Angels, with cows maddened by a storm, and later, after wondering about the meaning of the phrase ‘Mach 2’ and learning it to be derived from the surname of Ernst Mach (1838–1916)—who had contended that atoms were ‘unobservables' and thus mere ideas—she united images of a storm with early twentieth-century atomic theory, planting the seed out of which the novel grew (Penelope Fitzgerald, The Afterlife, ed. Terence Dooley (New York: Counterpoint-Perseus, 2003), 370–71).
17 Fitzgerald's ‘novels acknowledge the loss of paradise, with an awareness that what passes for innocence in this world is, at best, a self-serving parody of its ancient precursor,’ Philip Harlan Christensen remarks (‘Penelope Fitzgerald (17 December 1916—),’ Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, 2nd Ser. 194, ed. Merritt Moseley (Detroit: Gale, 1998), 12). Nevertheless, the two protagonists of The Gate of Angels retain a great deal of innocence implicit in their faith in goodness.
18 Commenting on her protagonist, Fitzgerald identifies Daisy as ‘a fearless survivor, a favorite type with the late-Victorian and Edwardian light novelists … Men don't disconcert these girls, nor do the regulations and prohibitions men make’ (Afterlife 371). Fred's sisters, heavily invested in the suffragette movement, represent politically active versions of the type. Frank Kermode says of the movement ‘[i]t is a cause that echoes throughout the book’ (xv).
19 Julian Gitzen, ‘Elements of Compression in the Novels of Penelope Fitzgerald,’ Essays in Arts and Sciences 26 (1997): 1–14.
20 Throughout Fitzgerald's work Tess Lewis finds expressions of ‘the moral force of imagination. For without the ability to imagine the sufferings and joys of others, how are we to find compassion for them or even resilience for ourselves?’ (36).
21 Identifying the ghost story writer M. R. James (1962–1936) with the character Dr. Mathews and with qualities in The The Gate of Angels and in Fitzgerald's fiction generally, Dean Flower states that Fitzgerald, like James, ‘protests against a world over-invested in materiality.’ For Flower, Mathews's narrative represents ‘the key to the novel’ (‘Ghosts, Shadow Patterns and the Fiction of Penelope Fitzgerald,’ The Hudson Review 54.1 (2001), 136, 135). Combining elements of insanity, cruelty, and religious corruption with overtones of sexuality and a death wish, the ghost story would support a full-blown Freudian exegesis.