‘Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man’, as Shelley phrased it. This is not to be confused with the moral education of characters in, say, a Henry James novel, but a refining of the reader’s senses. Nowadays it is fashionable to debunk the notion of art as humanising, a kind of moral education.
The Gilead novels certainly cause us to revive that grand old humanistic claim that Literature trains our moral feelings. 198): ‘It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.’ Robinson approached a similar idea from a Christian perspective in The Death of Adam (2005) where she wrote that ‘humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art.’ Robinson would take exception to this no doubt, arguing as she does in an illuminating interview in The Paris Review (No.
A further consolation surely is that, given the way the author treats her thematic concerns, the Gilead novels read like religious texts – at least for sympathetic non-believers.
The Cold War (with its tense race relations) and the hardscrabble 1930s are settings which to us, with our increasingly dysfunctional world view, seem comparatively innocent. One reason for the success of these novels may be that their settings of- fer the reader the consolation of distance. The first two novels deal with the anxieties and hopes of John Ames and Robert Boughton, old clergymen in the small, fictional Iowan town of Gilead in the 1950s, the latest with the early life of Lila Dahl, Ames’s wife. With Gilead (2004), Home (2008) and Lila (2014) Marilynne Robinson has produced a body of work of a quality unparalleled in modern fiction, I believe.
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