In Context...

Contextual Materials

Rebecca Reed’s “Six Months in a Convent” deals with two main issues. The first one is anti-Catholicism. In the Protestant antebellum America, Catholics were regarded with no small amount of suspicion. Perhaps rightly so; the Catholic Church is renowned for keeping its own council and its rituals secret, so misunderstandings have and do occur. The more paranoid of the antebellum conspiracy theorists worried that the Vatican had designs on taking over the government.
The second issue is not directly addressed in the novel but is an integral part of the public reaction and the falling-out of the burning of the Charleston, MA, Ursuline Convent on Mt. Benedict in 1834. Catholicism—more specifically, nuns and their convents—posed a threat to the American Protestant woman’s role in society, or true womanhood. Nuns chose to remain single, thereby rejecting the husband and children that defined the woman’s sphere, and had a remarkable amount of autonomy in the community for those times.
The documents below are gathered with the intent of helping a reader of “Six Months in a Convent” understand the text in the contexts of anti-Catholicism, true women, new women, nuns, and the riot. The materials are separated under category headings.


Anti-Catholicism:

1. Billington, Ray Allen. “Tentative Bibliography of Anti-Catholic Propaganda in the United States (1800-1860). The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Jan., 1933), pp. 492-513. http://www.jstor.org

2. Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86. http://www.zbths.org/1653109815561217/lib/1653109815561217/_files/Richard_Hofstadter.pdf

Hofstadter examines the history of the paranoid, conspiracy-theorist form of politics from the 1700’s to the twentieth century in America, including the anti-Masonist movements as well as anti-Catholicism. Anti-Catholic conspiracies include Maria Monk’s escaped nun tale, the belief of a Catholic-Protestant holy war sanctioned by Rome, priestly spies, and that the Pope and Europe seek to take over the government. This essay is important because these paranoid ideas were still thriving well in the nineteenth-century.

3. Griffin, Susan M. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Griffin examines the role and form of Anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century literature, as a genre. This might help a reader understand SMiaC better in regards to the genre of the anti-Catholic “escaped nun” tale.

True Womanhood:

1. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly, 18.2 (Summer, 1966), pp. 151-174. http://www.jstor.org
Welter’s “Cult of True Womanhood” explains exactly what the roles of nineteenth-century women were, the virtues ideal women were expected to possess, and the rationale behind them.

2. Roberts, Mary Louise. “True Womanhood Revisited.” Journal of Women’s History, 14.1 (Spring 2002), pp. 150-156. Academic Search Premier. http://ezproxy.lib.ucf.edu/login?URL=http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.ucf.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=6479854&site=ehost-live

Robert’s responds to Welter’s “Cult of True Womanhood” for not having a strong enough analytic framework, and briefly looks at the transition from the ideal True Woman to the New Woman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century.

New Womanhood:
Todd, Ellen Wiley. The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. eScholarship Editions http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft9k4009m7;brand=eschol

This is an eBook that can be found freely over the web. The first chapter in particular will serve as a good outline for what exactly the New Woman is. After reading the essays on true womanhood, the scandal of SMiaC will become much clearer, as the inmates of the Ursuline Convent (including Reed herself) start to resemble more the New Woman than the True Woman.

Nuns:

http://www.CatholicNunsToday.org
A brief site about what exactly nuns and sisters are and do, the roles they fulfill in their communities, and a definition of their vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. If I were editing a new edition of SMiaC, I would certainly make sure that the diverse roles of Catholic nuns and convents in the community were explained.


Charleston Convent:

"Burning of the Charlestown Convent," Boston Evening Transcript, 12 August, 1834.
http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/949.htm

This site contains a transcript of the Boston Evening paper regarding the burning and fall-out of the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charleston. The site is a part of the Yale “Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.”If I were editing a new edition of SMiaC, I would definitely seek to include these papers.