John Henry Newman, in his Apologia, forms a vision of doubt and certainty by an appeal to space and motion: “Certitude of course is a point, but doubt is a progress.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing a century later, echoes the thought in On Certainty: “Our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.” In both imaginings, doubt is a thing in motion, dependent upon or in necessary proximity to certainty. Wittgenstein’s image of a door is particularly suggestive. Doubt may be imagined as a closing door, isolating the self who doubts. And yet it may also be pictured as a portal to some new and larger affirmation or faith.This panel explores the possibility that doubt, as it is practiced and discussed in certain nineteenth-century authors, might be an active, generative, and affirmative force. All three panelists entertain the notion that “faith” may emerge from what Christina Rossetti calls the “cavilling mind of doubt.” Most broadly, this panel asks the question, “what forms of doubt in the nineteenth century become potential agents of affirmative thought, and how?”

Answering this question will require a robust understanding of both “doubt” and “form”—two words of great interest in English scholarship over the past two decades. Nineteenth-century doubt has undergone a reappraisal by those who have examined the so-called secularization narrative: Charles LaPorte, Vincent Pecora, Sara Lyons, Michael Hurley, George Levine, and others. Some have emphasized the tendency of traditional secularization narratives to deprivilege or write off as outmoded those authors who emphasize traditional belief. Hurley, in Faith in Poetry (2018), argues that opposing doubt to faith is “cartoonishly unhelpful” and flattens much of the complexity in work by nineteenth century authors, whose faith is animated by and inextricable from doubt. Others point to what Lyons calls “a complementary effort” among those such as Walter Pater, Annie Besant, and Charles Swinburne who reject traditional belief “to formulate a vibrant alternative to Victorian paradigms of religious doubt and unbelief.” Most have shown that rich readings open themselves to those who see faith as more than narcotic or nostalgic ignorance and doubt as more than scientistic rejection of traditional theism.

Questions of doubt are necessarily interleaved with questions of literary form. This overlap has been emphasized lately by a thriving parallel discourse surrounding “form” itself. Angela Leighton, Derek Attridge, Caroline Levine, Simon Jarvis, and others have engaged with the difficulties, political commitments, and involutions of the term.These scholars emphasize that literary form as cognition makes tacit but real epistemological claims, and the form in which a work is written participates in and is inextricable from the content of that work. Given this claim, nineteenth-century doubt and nineteenth century literary forms invite, even require bracketing. It is this consubstantiality between doubt and form that seems to animate Pater’s claim in his essay, “Style” that “imaginative prose” may be the “special art of the modern world” and Matthew Arnold’s vision in his “Study of Poetry” of a “fit prose” free from “Puritan” religious certainties. This panel is, in part, a way of understanding further that sense of “fit” between doubt and the forms in which it appears.

All three panelists will roam this cross-stained border between nineteenth-century form and doubt in unique and complementary ways. Mimi Winick, in “‘Doubt, everywhere!’: Walter Pater’s Enchanted Modernities” will explore forms of enchantment that both emerge from doubt in traditional belief and offer alternatives to it. She will show that doubt as thought out in Pater’s nonfiction prose is less a closing off and more an opening out into a spiritual “ecstasy,” compatible with and written into modernity. Vincent Pecora’s “Meta-Suspicion and Perverse Faith” will examine the skepticism of Friedrich Nietzsche and by doing so reveal the tendency of radical doubting to gravitate toward some kind of affirmation. He will argue that Nietzsche’s is a “meta-suspicion” that, by suspecting classical suspicion begins to curl back into a shape suspiciously like belief. Charles LaPorte, in “Doubt’s Doubles: the Mysteries of Constance Naden” will show the limitations of deploying “religious” and “secular” as terms of identity in the nineteenth century, arguing that neither faith nor doubt is a “fixed reference” point from which one can deduce an author’s literary commitments. Through the work of two nineteenth-century poets with opposing religious beliefs, Constance Naden and May Kendall, he will show that theist and “non-theist faith” can share similar formal concerns, as both faith and doubt are concepts that “manifest themselves in language.” Each paper will be twenty minutes in length, leaving the final fifteen minutes of the session for open discussion.

This panel weighs the counterintuitive possibility that doubt might be a kind of faith, or else the condition for some affirmation. As the panellists reveal in different ways, to say that doubt can act affirmatively is not to agree with W. B. Yeats’s aphorism that “every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough.” It is, however, to claim that sometimes the scratch- or wound-like pain of doubting is one possible spur to new vision.