Friday, January 25, 2013
Influence of the Church
One of the interesting aspects of the story is how the influence of religion tries to give the some of characters more control over their emotions and convince them to do what is right. In one scene you have Isabella residing in a safe house in a church from Manfred. Towards the end of the story at the church setting, the image of the church becomes more of a conscience being that affects the fate of all the characters. These scenes are examples of how the aspect of the ideology of the church has a huge impact to all the social classes of the characters. The church portrayed in the story is more of a hospital or community service center, which is the role to aid its members. Because of this belief, if not most of the cast behaves according to what they perceive as who is the good guy and who is the bad guy buy there belief system they hold.
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At the end of the novel, the church is given a voice through Father Jerome (see p. 85), but it also becomes the site of supernatural events: when Manfred says that Frederic has waived his claim to the throne, blood falls from the nose of a staue in the convent; when Frederic comes to seek Hippolita in the church, encounters a skeleton hermit in the oratory; Manfred claims heaven directed his hand when he murdered Matilda. The church may seem like a shelter or aid, but Father Jerome leads Manfred astray by lying to him and the church becomes a site of terror, haunting, vengeance, and murder. The ideology of the church, in other words, is not stable in the novel, and the church (through Jerome and as a sanctuary) does as much bad as it does good.
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