초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper aims to demonstrate the overlapping realms in religious discourse and the sensational imagination by analyzing Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia; New Foes with an Old Face (1853), an early Christian novel that projects England’s current religious debates onto the past. As an anti-Catholic writer, Kingsley polemically sensationalizes early church history by staging graphic scenes of assault and mutilation, especially in the scene of Hypatia’s violent martyrdom. However, even as the novel condemns the brutal violence of early church history, abject spectacles of female suffering arouse both horror and fascination by inviting the reader to indulge in voyeuristic spectatorship. This paper argues that Hypatia’s religious sensationalism shaped the spectatorial impulse of Victorian representations of martyrdom, while enabling spectators to relish in the scopophilic gaze.
