Epilogue

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.

An Escaped Nun

The publication of Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu by Maria Monk captivated hundreds of thousands of Americans when it appeared in 1836. The runaway nun’s allegations against the convent “inmates,” including rape, torture, murder, and infanticide, prompted demands to outlaw convents in the United States. Testimonies and convent investigations held public interest. Despite the discovery that Monk was a former prostitute and not a nun, Awful Disclosures continued to sell well, inspiring a host of spin-offs. Monk herself fell into a life of poverty and crime before dying at the young age of thirty-two alone in prison. She never profited from the book that bore her name, but she helped launch a campaign that permeated the country for the next three decades. This chapter traces the rise and fall of Maria Monk, the controversy of her book, and the culture in which these events unfolded.

Escaped Nuns

Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery sold over 20,000 copies. By “escaped nun,” Maria Monk, the book provided a shocking exposé of convent life, from licentious priests to tortured nuns to infanticide. Despite Maria Monk’s unveiling as an imposter, her book went on to become the second bestseller before the Civil War, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Far from representing a curious aberration, Monk’s book was part of a larger phenomenon, involving riots, propaganda, and politics. The campaign against convents was intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and in particular the role of women in the republic. At a time when concern for “female virtue” consumed many Americans, nuns were a barometer of attitudes toward women. The veiled nun stood as the inversion of the true woman, needed to sustain the purity of the nation. She was a captive for a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a “white slave,” and a “foolish virgin.” In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers, both male and female, crafted this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns and women more broadly in America.

“So many foolish virgins”: nuns and anti-Catholicism from Maria Monk to the Know-Nothings

This dissertation examines opposition to nuns and convent life in America as it was expressed through vigilante violence, propaganda literature, and party politics. While nuns may seem like an unlikely target of hostility, a vast cohort of Americans singled them out as a serious threat to the republic. Between 1830 and 1860 anti-convent propaganda, including Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu by “escaped nun” Maria Monk, flooded the literary market. Monk’s work warned of a Catholic conspiracy in the United States through the cloister, depicted alleged horrors of convent life, and cast nuns variously as masculine tyrants, foolish slaves, and whores. Investigators quickly unveiled Maria Monk as an impostor, but her book became the second best-seller after Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War, and it has never gone out of print. In order to “protect” American women from the nun’s life, mobs stormed convents from Massachusetts to Maryland. By the 1850s, suspicion of nuns became formally politicized by Know-Nothing legislators who established “Nunnery Committees” for convent investigations. Although the Civil War quieted the outcry against nuns for a time, the campaign against convents had far-reaching implications. Members of the second Ku Klux Klan relied on anti-convent propaganda to buttress their positions, and common stereotypes of nunsâ€"first evident in nineteenth-century convent narrativesâ€"have also persisted in popular culture. This dissertation argues that the campaign against nuns and convent life was a much greater part of nineteenth-century American popular culture and politics than previous historians have recognized.

Blanco White’s Evidence

In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, published in 1851, John Henry Newman examined the evidence against Catholicism of two witnesses: Joseph Blanco White and Maria Monk. Of Blanco he could speak from his own experience. He was, he said, ‘a man of great talent, various erudition and many most attractive points of character… I admired him for the simplicity and openness of his character, the warmth of his affections, the range of his information, his power of conversation, and an intellect refined, elegant and accomplished. I loved him from witnessing the constant sufferings bodily and mental, of which he was the prey, and for his expatriation on account of his religion… He was certainly most bitter-minded and prejudiced against everything in and connected with the Catholic Church; it was nearly the only subject on which he could not brook opposition; but this did not interfere with the confidence I placed in his honour and truth’. Newman went on to contrast Blanco’s character with that of Maria Monk. ‘Whatever the one said was true, as often as he spoke to facts he had witnessed, and was not putting out opinions or generalising on evidence; whatever the other said was, or was likely to be, false… Yet the truth spoken against us by the man of character is forgotten, and the falsehood spoken against us by the unworthy woman lives’.