ABSTRACT
Literary criticism has brought to light many cultural forces that disrupt the marriage plots of Victorian novels, but has missed one that emerges directly from Protestant theology. Focusing on Charles Kingsley’s Yeast and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, this chapter explains why these novels first encourage expectations of love and marriage only to thwart the pleasure they have carefully nurtured. The public and private work of both writers reveals the extent to which they shared concern about idolatrous love. In both novels, the death of affianced lovers and the abrupt collapse of marriage plots serve to punish the protagonists – and readers as well – for investing too much interest in romantic love.
