One of the birth announcements of modernism was the Bauhaus manifesto, with its cover illustration of "The Cathedral of Socialism" by Lyonel Feininger. I have always taken this image at face value, in terms of Walter Gropius' claim that the Bauhaus was carrying the handicraft guild ideal of William Morris into the machine age, with all the contradictions and ironies of that agenda. Although Feininger's cathedral falls outside of Elizabeth Emery's time frame, she describes a rich and complex discourse surrounding the image of the Gothic cathedral in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century French culture that renders the Bauhaus gesture, and many others like it, infinitely more complex.
Elizabeth Emery traces the ways in which the cathedral is gradually separated from its medieval context and transformed into a virtual space in which national, spiritual and aesthetic conflicts could seek resolution. Emery demonstrates that from the 1890s through the separation of French church and state in 1905, the Gothic cathedral was a frequently invoked metaphor and subject for French writers of many different political, aesthetic and religious persuasions. Her primary examples are Emile Zola, J.-K. Huysmans and Marcel Proust, though she makes allusions or references to a host of other writers, painters and intellectuals. Emery's point is to show how the Gothic cathedral becomes a common arena inhabited by otherwise conflicting ideologies and aesthetic positions, thereby becoming something of a figure for French polity itself. After the partisan debacle of the construction of the basilica of Sacre-Coeur on Montmartre and the wrenching divisions of the Dreyfus Affair, the Gothic cathedral becomes identified with a certain spirit of France, one that could be entered by both left and right. The physical fate of those Gothic churches deepened rather than weakened that identification, including the wholesale abandonment of maintenance following the separation of church and state and the bombardment of so many buildings in World War I.
In Chapter I, "The Synthesis of France", Emery traces the transformation of the cathedral from a medieval artifact to a mythological representation of France itself. She provides a clear and cogent overview of the Gothic revival and the interpretation of the Gothic in the early nineteenth century and then focuses on the span of time between the building of the basilica of Sacre-Coeur and World War I, with the separation of church and state in 1905 as her fulcrum. Chapter II examines Zola's surprising turn to cathedrals as the focal image of his late novels. From the fiercely anti-catholic of the naturalist years, Zola turns to an idealistic visionary agenda in his later novels, in which the Gothic cathedral becomes a basis for a democratic religion of science. Chapter III centers on J.-K. Huysmans' controversial and highly public conversion to Catholicism and places Huysmans' celebration of medieval faith in the tradition of later French Catholic novelists such as Paul Claudel and Francois Mauriac. A point that Emery stresses is that the turn to the medieval in Zola and Huysmans is by no means a withdrawal or retreat from the present. Both remain engaged in public affairs and exploit their fame and notoriety to publicize their evolving views. In her final chapter on Proust, Emery traces the role played by the cathedral in the development of an aesthetic theory by both the author and his protagonist. She places this development in the context of the memorial and symbolic value the cathedral assumed after secularization in 1905, a value which was to be heightened by the destruction of so many actual cathedrals in World War I. For those readers of The Medieval Review interested in medievalism in general and not in the novelists she discusses, the first few chapters and the conclusion (pp. 1-43 and 161-172) can be profitably read on their own as a compelling and convincing essay in cultural criticism. The book is illustrated with several prints depicting cathedrals that reflect the obsession described in the text.
Romancing the Cathedral also deepens our understanding of the various nineteenth century debates surrounding the national origin and identity of the Gothic, and highlights how asynchronous and asymmetric Gothic revivals and neomedievalisms were across Europe. By the turn of the century, John Ruskin's influence had been transformed in scale and cultural force by the Arts and Crafts movement, but Ruskin was translated and popularized in France (by Proust among others) in the 1890s and his ideas carried a new moral and aesthetic force there. Mid- nineteenth century Gothic in England had been appropriated by Anglican missionary and conservative reform groups, branding the Gothic a northern, Protestant (despite the high church debt to Pugin) and English. But in France, Viollet-le-Duc and his circle argued against an exclusively Catholic ownership of the Gothic image, and they interpreted the cathedral as a product of a free urban culture resisting the hegemony of church hierarchy, so that the Gothic is imagined as consistent with the traditions of Republicanism. Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame des Paris had also fixed a certain notion of the Middle Ages as populist carnival. Emery's originality lies partly in demonstrating how the conservative spirituality of Chateaubriand or the populist fantasies of a Hugo were superseded by an entirely new valence for the cathedral in turn of the century France, one in which the cathedral becomes a sort of open city, allowing a divided France a common metaphoric space. For Zola and Huysmans, the cathedral was "a symbolic compromise between the religious myths begun by changeable and the democratic myths disseminated by Hugo". (32)
Despite its rich historicization, this book is primarily a work of literary interpretation and revaluation. Late Zola and late Huysmans remain deeply unassimilable, despite their astonishing contemporary popularity, which she documents by dogged research in contemporary periodicals and journals. The almost symbolist Middle Ages of Zola's Les Trois Villes and the apparently genuine religiosity of Huysmans apparently have little to do with how criticism has valued their more famous, earlier work, and critics have paid little attention to them. A reader like myself who has puzzled over these peculiar examples of medievalism (and never quite got through all of them) will be grateful to Emery's patient explication of both the intent and the aesthetic of these late works, even if one is not entirely moved to ecstasy over them. Although enthusiasm for the Middle Ages runs through the symbolist movement, Zola, Huysmans and Proust were the first French novelists since Hugo to fully describe the Gothic cathedral in detail, and all were taken with the Gesamtkunstwerk effect of the Cathedral, which they attempted to emulate in their fiction. Zola's protagonist, Pierre Froment, in Les Trois Villes, has lost his faith and attempts to restore it through visits to Lourdes, Rome and Paris, the result of which is something like a social gospel. Huysmans' earlier and more famous novels could have priests engaged in murderous satanic orgies, but by the 1890s, his cycle of novels tracing the spiritual quest of the atheist Durtal, seeking out and living in spiritual communities, is presented a solution to the decay of modern values. And, of course, Proust's hero famously rediscovers the religion of art after visiting the churches at Combray, Balbec and Venice. Far from being escapist, however, argues Emery, these novels engage ongoing political and social developments, and are concerned with social order and disorder, and all resolve their protagonists' crises in a cathedral. The Proust materials may seem more familiar, but in fact Emery here also constructs an original and subtle argument, attempting to show how the non-didactic aesthetic of Proust is in fact modelled on the semiotic power of the Gothic cathedral. Criticism has dealt with Proust, she suggests, largely by linking him with modernism and twentieth century developments, and she seeks to place him closer to his turn of the century contemporaries in his and their concerns.
Although Emery concerns herself with fiction rather than turn of the century scholarship on the Middle Ages for reasons of space and focus, some of the most intriguing pages in the book are on the latter topic. Emery points to the influence of Emile Male's The Gothic Image which is still used as a background and a guide to Gothic art, as being part of as well as an influence on the mania for the cathedral. She sees it as part of the same cultural movement that produces the didactic novels of Zola and Huysmans as well as the aesthetic appreciation of Proust. Male's cathedral, it would seem, belongs as much to the late nineteenth century as to the thirteenth. Similarly, though I was aware of how indebted Henry Adams was to French culture and scholarship, Emery's book alerted me to how Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is a translatio of this fin-de-siecle virtualization of the cathedral, which helps explain why Adams' book could become such a force in a Progressive-era America. Indeed, throughout, Romancing the Cathedral is able to intertwine the revival of medieval scholarship after the Franco-Prussian war with the newfound interest among major writers with the Gothic cathedral and with a sudden upsurge of popular medievalism. I needed to be reminded as to how late (1892, exhibited in Paris in 1895) was Monet's great cycle of the Rouen cathedral facade.
Emery makes good use of Andre Vauchez' interesting essay, "La Cathedrale," in the well-known collection, Les Lieux de Memoire, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 91-127. But I detect in Emery's argument a critique of the now classic history of memory. For what she uncovers in fin- de-siecle France is something other than historical nostalgia or invented tradition, it is the use of the Gothic as an intervention in the present, and becoming, in so doing, part of that present and its debates and conversations. Emery is more sympathetic to the intentionality and positivism of her subjects, and perhaps to positivism in general, than postmodern historiography would generally allow. Emery's arguments have forced me to rethink many of my own assumptions about turn of the century medievalisms. Where I see something of a crisis, in which certain strands of medievalism divide and conflict, she sees a coming together, a positive synergy of previously discrete discourses.
Over the past few years, a remarkable surge of highly sophisticated studies have projected medievalism as one of the paradigms for the understanding of history and memory, a project nurtured for some time by the interesting articles in the series Studies in Medievalism. A new concern with how medieval culture has been represented since the seventeenth century can be found in such books as R. Howard Bloch and Stephen Nichols' Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), Kathleen Biddick's The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), David Matthews' The Making of Middle English (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Allen Frantzen's The Desire for Origins (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), Stephanie Trigg's Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) and Steve Ellis' Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Emery is now engaged in a related study, of popular manifestations of this same spirit, as embodied in recreations of medieval festivities such as the Feast of Fools in the nineteenth century and such remarkable creations as Albert Robida's "Vieux Paris" at the 1900 Paris International Exhibition. Romancing the Cathedral is already a major contribution to the ongoing history of medievalism and to how modernity understands and appropriates the past. It is a worthy successor volume to Janine Dakyns' The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851- 1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), Clare A. Simmons' Reversing the Conquest : History and Myth in Nineteenth-century British Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990) and Alice Chandler's A Dream of Order (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970) as one of the standard studies of nineteenth century medievalism.