"Curae non ipsa in Morte relinquunt": Jansenism and Elizabeth Singer Rowe's Fiction (1728–32)

Abstract:Elizabeth Singer Rowe's unusual exploration of the relationship between love, death, and the immortality of the soul in the Friendship in Death duology (1728–32) is generally deemed a pivotal contribution to the elevation of novel writing and reading in the English Protestant Enlightenment. Scholars tend to ascribe Rowe's unusual exploration only to her innovative appropriation of an extremely popular genre at the time—namely, the amatory novella—yet as this article argues, it is equally influenced by her reading in the contemporaneous Jansenist theology of the Catholic Reformation. This article challenges the emerging scholarly consensus that Rowe's duology is an anti-Jansenist work by reassessing the very foundation of that consensus: namely, the crucial relationship between Friendship in Death's secret-revelatory epistles and its theological appendix, titled "Thoughts on Death," which Rowe excerpted and translated from the eminent Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole's Essais de morale. This article argues that the epistles and the appendix are not contrastive in their views on death and the afterlife, as scholars have believed to date, but are mutually consistent. Such a reassessment also reveals for the first time that what Rowe really means by her key concept, the "friendship in death," is by no means what scholars have deemed the death-transcending earthly love and friendship (part 1). It also reveals that Rowe's appendix, if read in the Jansenist way, is not solely concerned with death but is equally concerned with love (part 2). The article concludes by arguing that Nicolean Jansenism is not just the theological underpinning for Rowe's unusual exploration; it is also the key to helping us resolve a pivotal yet perplexing problem in the burgeoning field of Rowe studies about the "this-worldly secret" behind her otherworldly secret revelation (part 3). In revealing how Jansenism informs and shapes the duology, this article also contributes to rethinking the current historiography about Jansenism that regards it as a theological movement primarily in early modern France with no known impact on the contemporaneous English literary scene.