Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion

Lived Theologies and Literature

Mary McCartin Wearn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317087366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Nineteenth-century American women's culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women's literature. The contributors examine fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs by professional authors, social activists, and women of faith, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. Embracing the complexities of lived religion in women's culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential-Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political, or spiritual ends.

Chapter 1
Renegade Religious:
Performativity, Female Identity, and the Antebellum Convent-Escape Narrative

Nancy F. Sweet
California State University, Sacramento

Shortly after the night watchman at the Maryland convent of St. Joseph’s cried out 3:00 on a November morning in 1854, a sister clad in habit and shawl crept out of her cell, past the cloisters and into the convent chapel. Armed with a refectory knife, she slipped through an open window and sped ten miles to an inn where she would report of nuns suffering privation and abuse in the hallowed religious institution founded by Mother Elizabeth Seton in 1809. The escapee was Josephine Bunkley, a seventeen-year-old Virginia woman who had converted to Roman Catholicism two years earlier and then taken up residence with the Sisters of Charity as a novice, or probationary nun, in January of 1854 against the wishes of her Protestant Episcopalian family. Awed by the “dramatic effect of the Roman Catholic ritual” (Bunkley 14), Bunkley had dreamed that the convent sisters enjoyed an exalted state of “Christian perfection,” dedicating themselves “to the service of the Almighty” (219). But in her ten months as a novice, Bunkley claimed to observe the routine withholding of medical care for sisters fallen ill, the systematic use of violence to enforce silent complicity with convent authority, and the subjecting of the sisters to the sexual demands of priests held unaccountable for abuse. When her efforts to contact her family for assistance failed, the seventeen-year-old fled.

After the Frederick Examiner, a local newspaper, printed a dramatic account of Bunkley’s escape, the story was picked up by the New-York Observer, the Boston Congregationalist, and the Boston Pilot, further inflaming national debate over the legitimacy of Roman Catholic institutions in the United States. Both pro- and anti-Catholic forces fought for control over the story and its meaning, while Bunkley herself was scrutinized in the flurry of newspaper articles, editorials, letters to editors, and even a highly fictionalized, book-length narrative, The Escaped Nun, that appeared in the months after her return to “the world.” Did her claims affirm that “the Catholic system is adverse to liberty,” as Protestant preacher Lyman Beecher had charged in 1835 (61), or that “our welfare as a nation, will be greatly jeoparded, if Popish institutions and practices are suffered to spring up extensively among us,” as another critic of convents had declared (Larned iv)? Or did it instead attest to the indiscretion of women’s speech in the public sphere, and to the absurdity of taking seriously the escapades and fanciful tales of a “romantic, novel-reading girl,” as one priest characterized Bunkley in the aftermath of her departure from St. Joseph’s (qtd. in Bunkley 245)?

Her reputation and character at stake, Bunkley in 1855 published a first-person account of the circumstances that led to her apostasy from the Roman Catholic Church and her armed flight from St. Joseph’s. The publication only furthered suspicions about Bunkley’s credibility, however, given the similarities between her story and other widely-known accounts of convent abuses, some of which had proved fabricated by anti-Catholic zealots seeking to demonize the Church. Upon its release by Harper & Brothers, Miss Bunkley’s Book joined dozens of other convent exposés, narratives, treatises, and romances published between 1829 and the outbreak of the Civil War, a period in which the Catholic Church had emerged as the largest single religious body in the United States (Ahlstrom 527). The anti-Catholic sentiment that grew in tandem with this expansion found a particularly popular outlet in the genre of the convent-escape narrative, which critics have analyzed as a mass-marketing of religious and ethnic intolerance.¹ Many scholars also perceive a deeply entrenched misogyny in the genre’s depictions of spiritually (and sometimes sexually) seduced female apostates. Not only do convent-escape narratives promote vicious Catholic stereotypes, but, according to some critics, they also seek to reinforce women’s subjugation by depicting the Protestant female as vulnerable, weak, sexually fallen, and untrustworthy.

The narrative of Josephine Bunkley complicates this interpretation of the genre, however, by challenging antebellum notions of female identity and standards of feminine propriety. Bunkley’s text acclaims women’s right to speech and self-determination, and becomes a work as much about the creation of autonomous female identity as about the perceived problems of Catholicism. As the narrative demonstrates, the appeal of the Church for Bunkley originally stems in part from its theater; it appears to offer the postulant an opportunity to perform an identity independent from traditional Protestant women’s roles of wife, mother, or spinster. Through the performative utterance of vow-taking, the Catholic sister sets herself apart from Protestant strictures and becomes an agent in her own right, constructing a new identity through the very proclamation of her vows. For Bunkley, however, the promise of self-determination seemingly proffered by the Catholic sisterhood is met with the actuality of the convent’s demand for the sister’s silence or adherence to scripts written by others. Bunkley thus turns instead to an alternative model of evangelical Protestant performativity that ultimately guides her narrative and her writing self. Her story delivers a fantasy of self-transformation ironically enabled by the exigencies of the perceived threat of popery, and in so doing, attests to the power of the convent-escape genre to serve not only the reactionary agenda that critics have foregrounded, but also to create a fantasy of the free female agent whose mobility and capacity for metamorphosis triumph over the fixity and limitations of antebellum female identity.

In certain respects, Bunkley’s narrative seems typical of the antebellum convent-escape genre. As with most convent tales, it adheres to a master plotline whereby a Protestant daughter spurns her family’s religion in favor of a Catholicism that appears to offer an intensified spirituality and an active women’s religious role not available in the Protestant sphere. Under the sway of religious zeal, the convent-narrative heroine typically takes nun’s vows and enters a monastic community only to confront ecclesiastical corruption, an insolvent theology, and the systematic abuse of defenseless sisters—a scene that characterized the inner workings of the Catholic Church in the imaginations of many antebellum Protestants. These once best-selling tales of apostate nuns culminate variously in death, rescue, or escape for their heroines, but nearly all the renegade sisters in convent-escape narratives ultimately profess their rebirth into an evangelical spirituality emphasizing the doctrines of sola fide, salvation by faith alone, and sola scriptura, the belief that the Bible is absolute and complete in its spiritual authority on earth. In a declaration that affirms both doctrines, Bunkley asserts that “[t]he pure ray of heavenly light will attract and illuminate those only who steadily turn aside their gaze from the glare of delusive phantasms, which amuse, but bewilder and lead astray. God’s word alone can furnish that safe and unerring guidance; God’s spirit only can teach infallibly the soul” (18).

The most notorious example of the convent-narrative genre, and today the single most widely read, is the quasi-pornographic Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, a narrative ghostwritten by male Protestants in 1836 for Maria Monk, a woman who claimed to have escaped from a Canadian convent she described as a charnel house of murder and sexual depravity.² Posing as a real-life exposé, its sales—which numbered into the hundreds of thousands and, by some accounts, outsold all other works in the antebellum era but Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Bible—suggest the widespread fascination of readers with the perceived illicitness of Roman Catholicism, its hidden interior spaces, its celibate clergy and sisterhood (easily suspected of illicit sexuality), its mysterious confessional (where many Protestants believed Catholics underwent a form of priestly mind-control), and its ostensible superstitiousness.³ As critics have argued, the popularity of Monk’s narrative also suggests the misogynistic pleasure of readers eager for representations of women’s seduction, captivity, and physical victimization.⁴ Although some convent narratives like Bunkley’s were penned by women who had actually lived in convents, many, like the Awful Disclosures, were the production of evangelical Protestant male authors and editors, including J. J. Slocum, George Bourne, and Samuel Morse, all of whom profited financially and politically by popularizing narratives of abused nuns. With titles such as Rosamond: or, A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under the Popish Priests, Convent’s Doom, and Danger in the Dark: A Tale of Intrigue and Priestcraft, many of the bestselling runaway-nun stories incorporate Gothic stock-and-store in keeping with their entirely fictional nature. Haunted chapels, secret underground cells, mysterious midnight moans, and sudden outbreaks of conflagration are as typical of antebellum convent tales as of Matthew Lewis’s classic 1796 novel of Catholic scandal, The Monk: A Romance.

Bunkley’s narrative largely eschews such Gothic flourishes in its mostly prosaic renderings of her convent’s wearisome routines and regulations. In contrast to the lurid pleasure readers might find in Maria Monk’s depictions of women’s degradation, Bunkley’s narrative offers a different appeal in its representation of a self-assertive woman who emerges defiant and unbroken upon liberating herself from her convent ordeal. Bunkley’s spectacular enactment of escape after months of forced silence and emotional isolation provides antebellum readers a powerful model of rebellion against the very gender subjugation convent narratives are understood by critics to promulgate. Rather than offering scenes of women’s victimization for the purpose of amusement, Bunkley’s story operates similarly to colonial tales of Indian captivity, which, as Christopher Castiglia has argued, could provide catharsis for women confined within constrictive and oppressive gender roles:

Captivity … gives symbolic form to the culturally unnameable: confinement within the home, enforced economic dependence, rape, compulsory heterosexuality, prescribed plots. The novels based on [captivity] narratives assert the metaphorical usefulness of captivity for women readers … thereby suggesting the potential value for women of reading captivity stories as a way not only to express other forms of constraint but also to enter a community of fellow ‘captives.’ (Bound and Determined 4)

The deranged female captive in Maria Monk’s debunked account of forced participation in abuse and murder hardly provides such a model for reader identification. But Bunkley’s more tenable and cogent narrative of a young female character’s emergence from the regimented, self-effacement required of her in the convent puts forth a model of calm endurance, autonomy, and self-respect that many female readers, themselves familiar with the highly constrictive nature of antebellum domesticity, might experience with vicarious pleasure. Indeed, in Bunkley’s refashioning of her identity, first through apostasy and then through authorship, the narrative seeks to move readers beyond identification with female suffering and toward a sympathetic approval of her ultimate self-actualization.

After the publication of the Maria Monk narrative in 1836, intensive investigation and a series of lawsuits quickly demonstrated its claims to be fabricated, its authors to be “No-Popery” males, and its subject to be a mentally-compromised former prostitute and unwed mother. This unmasking of Monk resulted in lasting suspicions that women, especially former nuns, who claimed to have been abused in Catholic institutions likely suffer from madness, sexual promiscuity, or exploitation by evangelical Protestant males and thus are fundamentally not credible. One of Bunkley’s critics hoped to forestall the publication of her narrative by leveling against her the charge of being “another ‘Maria Monk’—a new authoress of ‘Awful Developments,’” and by implication, a whore undeserving of credence (Bunkley 269). Deep skepticism of defecting sisters has carried into recent studies of nativist literature, which have often sought to debunk the claims of anti-Catholic writings by traducing the character of female dissenters. Ray Allen Billington, for instance, dismisses the ostensibly autobiographical Six Months in a Convent, penned by disaffected postulant Rebecca Reed in 1835, by deriding her as a “commonplace chit of a girl” (71), while another scholar conjectures that Reed’s alienation from her Charlestown convent resulted from an inability to comprehend Catholicism because of her “limited education and abilities” (Schultz xiv). Billington’s dismissal of Josephine Bunkley as a “propagandist” (311) finds echoes in Jenny Franchot’s description of her as a “notorious ‘escaped nun’” whose unscrupulousness can be assumed without need for corroborating evidence (Roads to Rome 215). Taking as a given the imbecility, degeneracy, and mendacity of runaway nuns, scholars have not only interpreted apostates’ stories as nativist fictions, but even proclaimed the apostates themselves to be the misogynistic fantasy-creations of religiously intolerant male writers. Jenny Franchot concludes, “as a collaborative project between an ‘escaped nun’ and her ‘editor,’ the convent exposé marks the anomalous, incendiary, and highly profitable appropriation of the amateur and sentimental female voice by the male nativist” (Roads to Rome 146).

But the disproportionate critical attention paid to Maria Monk and the Awful Disclosures, which has been treated as paradigmatic of the convent-narrative genre, has masked the power of the genre to popularize modes of resistance to normative gender ideologies.⁵ Together with other female-authored convent narratives, Miss Bunkley’s Book departs from the generic formula of the Maria Monk narrative, not only in desisting from Gothic fictionalizing but also in foregrounding the experience of a woman finding her voice in a community that would enforce her silence. David S. Reynolds has identified the convent-narrative genre as one of the many varieties of subversive popular fiction that lie at the foundations of the American Renaissance, but critical foregrounding of the Awful Disclosures with its “shrieks of the helpless females in the hands of atrocious men” (Monk xvi) continues to foster an impression that female convent-narrative characters fall into a misogynistic binary of “lascivious wantons or wretched victims of sexual and physical abuse” (Griffin 32). According to this paradigm, the escaped nun serves either as a “cultural [deviant] in need of control” (Franchot, Roads to Rome 144) or as a “figure of shame” who has “proved herself unreliable by breaking her religious vows” (Griffin 47). What these analyses neglect to consider, however, are the ways in which narratives like Bunkley’s work to authorize the religious rebel in her refusal to submit to the ecclesiastical hierarchy that would demand her silence and subordination. Out of abhorrence for silent obedience to the Catholic authority, Bunkley’s narrative validates the rebellion of the renegade nun whose transgression against ecclesiastical superiors functions as a type of subversion of patriarchal ideology more generally.

Whether inclined to believe her story or not, Bunkley’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators have shared the presumption of an essential link between her character—her intelligence, work ethic, religiosity, veracity, even appearance—and the larger significance of her narrative. For antebellum Protestants harboring anti-Catholic prejudices, the harrowing story of Bunkley’s escape proved the former postulant a worthy heroine, or, as reported by the New-York Observer, a “very accomplished and beautiful young lady” who “repented” her connection to the convent only to discover herself its “prisoner” (“Escape of a Nun”). The Frederick Citizen in turn published the Mother Superior’s denunciation of Bunkley as a serial liar who was free to leave the convent at any time and who effected her extraordinary escape only as a melodramatic stunt. By interpreting her story as evidence of the deficiencies of Bunkley’s character, defenders of the convent were determined to elide the allegations of sexual abuse, overwork, degradation, and the withholding of medical treatment that her story raised. But both defenders and detractors of her story share the supposition that narrative and identity are mutually constitutive; a rightful interpretation of the narrative hinges on an accurate characterization of the runaway nun, whose identity in turn is contingent on the “truth” of her story.

With the “truth” of selfhood thus at stake, Bunkley sought to impose her own command over the narrative by composing a book-length manuscript detailing her conversion to Catholicism, her admission to the convent as a novice after the death of her mother, and her subsequent disillusionment with Catholic theology and practice. The stated purpose of her writing—as with so many nineteenth-century women’s personal narratives—is to edify readers.⁶ It is to fulfill a “sacred duty,” her editor claims, that she publishes her story, “a salutary caution to enthusiastic and innocent girls” (ix, 272). But her harrowing convent experience also endowed Bunkley with a prerogative to write, to author and authorize herself, not only by recounting her days at St. Joseph’s, but also by giving dramatic expression to the interiority of her own character. In writing herself, Bunkley offers a revision of her experience in the form of narrative spectacle rehearsed for the implicitly sympathetic Protestant reader, who authorizes the nun’s apostasy both through third-party adjudication of her plight and through vicarious participation in her rebellion.⁷

Bunkley’s narrative describes a variety of indignations and hardships experienced by the St. Joseph’s sisters, from enduring menial labor and seemingly pointless rituals, to submitting to unwanted sexual advances. Yet among the most vexing of the tribulations Bunkley records is being forbidden to read, speak, and write, activities strictly controlled during her tenure as a Catholic sister. Bunkley even traces the onset of her loss of faith to an episode in which the Mother Superior burns a letter that she has written and compels her to compose a new letter falsely attesting to her contentment as a sister. This scene, alongside numerous other instances of the suppression of nuns’ speech in the narrative, designates as an intrinsic injustice of Roman Catholicism its imposition of silence upon women and its expropriation of female voices for institutional ventriloquizing. Repeatedly in Bunkley’s narrative the sisters are required to stifle both verbal and nonverbal expression and to utter instead what is scripted by ecclesiastical authorities, not only in prayer and ritual but also in personal interactions with other sisters and with people outside the convent walls.

Does Bunkley’s narrative contain more exaggeration or misinformation about convent life than it does accurate reporting of facts? Likely this question cannot be perfectly resolved, but as one historian of monasticism has concluded, “Writers did not have to stray very far from the truth in order to evoke strong reactions to the ‘un-American’ behavior patterns which actually did characterize much of nineteenth-century religious life in the United States” (Ewens 165–166). The monastic system with its strict demands for obedience, unyielding schedule of duties, and collectivist customs clearly conflicted with Jacksonian-era e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Renegade Religious: Performativity, Female Identity, and the Antebellum Convent-Escape Narrative
• 2 Shaping Narrative: Julia A. J. Foote’s Theology of Holiness
• 3 Composing Radical Lives: Women as Autonomous Religious Seekers and Nineteenth-Century Memoirs
• 4 “Come Right Down With Me”: Poverty, Agency, and Incarnational Reading in the Work of Rebecca Harding Davis
• 5 Religious Popular Culture and the Critique of Romantic Racialism in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig
• 6 “One [Hermaphroditic] Angel”: Swedenborg, Gender Complementarity, and Divine Love in Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite
• 7 “The Grace of God Assisting”: Abolitionist Women and the Politics of Religion
• 8 “A Religion of Their Own”: Louisa May Alcott’s New American Religion
• 9 “A startling reform”: Women and Christianity in the Work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
• 10 The Puritan Roots of Sarah Piatt’s Feminist Materialism
• Works Cited
• Index