Sins of the Flesh: Zola, Naturalism and the Madeleine Redemption Narrative in Nineteenth-Century France

Mary Magdalene has endured over the centuries as a powerful icon for the redemption of the so-called sins of the flesh. In arguing that her appeal to writers was experienced no more keenly than in nineteenth-century France, this article reflects on the political, ideological and gender assumptions that are woven into the Madeleine narrative of redemption. It goes on to propose that, with the rise of the naturalist novel, relying on pseudo-scientific theories of pre-determination, the Madeleine myth is radically rewritten in Zola’s Madeleine Férat, an often neglected novel in which the Calvinist doctrine of original sin and predestination not only challenges the very notion of redemption from sexual waywardness, but inflects some of the defining principles of naturalism.

Whose sins do the Brethren confess? The problem of sin as the problem of expiation

Among Brethren fisher families in Gamrie, northeast Scotland, professional clergy and written liturgy are held to be blasphemous denials of the true workings of the Holy Spirit. God, I was told, chooses to speak through all born-again (male) persons, unrestricted by the vain repetitions of lettered clerics and their prayer books. In this context, confession of one’s own sin is a private and pointedly interior affair. In Gamrie, not only did every man seek to be his own skipper, but also his own priest. Yet, much of Brethren worship is given over to ritualised acts of confession. So whose sins do the Brethren confess, and to what end? This article argues that among the Brethren of Gamrie, such acts involve confessing not one’s own sin, but the sins of a ‘sick’ and ‘fallen’ world. More than this, by attending to the sociological (as opposed to theological) processes of confessing the sins of another, we see a collapse in the distinction between confiteor and credo that has so dogged anthropological studies of Christianity. In Brethren prayer and bible study, as well as in everyday gossip, the “I confess” of the confiteor and the “I believe” of credo co-constitute one another in and through evidences of the ‘lostness’ of ‘this present age’. But how, if at all, does this solve ‘the problem of sin’? This article suggests that, with the ritual gaze of confession turned radically outward, Brethren announcements of global wickedness enact (in a deliberate tautology) both a totalising call for repentance from sin, and a millenarian creed of the imminent apocalypse. Here, the problem of ritual can be understood as the problem of (partially failed) expiation.

"Sins of their fathers" : culturally at risk children and the colonial state in Asia

In contact with their foreign surroundings, European enclaves throughout imperial Asia and Africa formed new cultural communities. Nevertheless, over time as Cooper and Stoler (1997) have argued, such colonial communities became subject to the same bourgeois project as experienced in the metropolitan centres to which they remained connected. If, in terms of that project, metropolitan European society was deemed vulnerable from a brutish and unruly working class, these colonial outposts of Western society were even more vulnerable to what was deemed to be the more insidious dangers of miscegenation and cultural hybridity. Where nineteenth century educators typically suggested that working class children were “at risk” of not being able to benefit from, and simultaneously representing “a risk to”, the emerging opportunities of bourgeois capitalist society, this “risk” was accentuated in the colonies by the additional category of race. Focussing on the question of children of mixed parentage as a category of “children at risk”, this paper examines the way educationists and politicians responded to what was perceived as “civilisational decline” in four such communities - the Dutch East Indies, British India, (British) Australia and French Indo-China - to demonstrate the universality of these concerns in Imperial Asia.

Die Siegesstele Naram-Sins, König von Akkad [Illustration] : (2750 v. d. g. Z.)

Scan von Monochrom-Mikroform

Die Siegesstele Naram-Sins aus Susa [Illustration] : Louvre

Scan von Monochrom-Mikroform

Vices and virtues, being a soul's confession of its sins with reason's description of the virtues. A middle-English dialogue of about 1200 A.D.

Includes index.

The Confession of faith, the Larger and Shorter catechisms, with the Scripture-proofs at large. Together with the Sum of saving knowledge (contain'd in the Holy Scriptures, and held forth in the said Confession and Catechisms) and Practical use thereof, Covenants national and Solemn league, Acknowledgement of sins and Engagement to duties, Directories, Form of church-government, & c. Of publick authority in the Church of Scotland. With Acts of Assembly and Parliament, relative to, and approbative of, the same.

Each pt. has special t.-p.

The pestilence : a punishment for public sins : a sermon, preached in the Middle Dutch Church, Nov. 17, 1822 : after the cessation of the yellow fever, which prevailed in New-York in 1822.

Shaw & Shoemaker

Splendid sins. A letter addressed to His Grace the Duke of Wellington.

Pamphlet.

The sins of the father : a romance of the South /

Mode of access: Internet.

Man in the middle; conversations of a tempted soul with two voices on the seven deadly sins,

Mode of access: Internet.

Tales of the seven deadly sins; being the Confessio amantis of John Gower,

Mode of access: Internet.

The sins of the fathers,

Introduction.--Imperialism.--The quantitative standard.--Materialism.