ABSTRACT
The 19th century, in the history of the Catholic-Protestant relations in Britain, may seem to be a welcome respite from the previous three centuries of conflicts. Abjection is the feeling of disgust mixed with paradoxical attraction to the Other. Psychoanalysis traces the origins of this feeling to the first differentiation that a human being has to make, when the infant starts to perceive its body as a different entity from mother's body; mother's body becomes the original Other. In order to achieve the individuation, English national psyche had to cast the Roman Catholic Church – the Mother Church – in the role of a usurper, or in fairy-tale terms, the wicked stepmother, who, as psychoanalytic readings of traditional fairy tales have pointed out repeatedly, is really a thinly disguised substitute for the biological mother. The conflict between the usurper Catholic mother and the legitimate Protestant one is played out to its utmost in Catherine Sinclair's Beatrice, or, Unknown Relatives.
