Maria Monk - Atmosphere of Anti-Catholic Sensationalism

Atmosphere of Anti-Catholic Sensationalism

Monk’s book was published in an American atmosphere of anti-Catholic hostility (partly fueled by early 19th-century Irish and German Catholic immigration to the U.S.) and followed the 1834 Ursuline Convent Riots near Boston. These were triggered by an incident in which one of the nuns left the convent but was persuaded to return on the following day by her superior, Mother Mary St. George, and by the Bishop of Boston, the Most Reverend Benedict Fenwick. This incident immediately gave rise to a rumor that the woman was being held in the convent against her will; a mob invaded and then burned down the convent in an effort to free her.

In 1835 Rebecca Reed published an anti-Catholic, gothic novel, a highly-colored account of her six months as an Episcopalian protestant charity pupil at the Ursuline convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Reed herself died of tuberculosis shortly after the publication of her book; her disease was widely believed to have been caused by the austerities to which she had been subjected at the convent.

Reed’s book became a bestseller, and Maria or her handlers hoped to cash in on the evident market for anti-Catholic horror fiction. Monk’s tale was clearly modeled on the gothic novels that were popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a literary genre that had already been used to stoke anti-Catholic sentiments in such works as Denis Diderot's La Religieuse. Monk’s story epitomizes the genre-defining elements of a young, innocent woman being trapped in a remote, old, gloomily picturesque estate, where she learns dark secrets and escapes after harrowing adventures.

Monk claimed that she had lived in the convent for seven years, become pregnant, and fled because she did not want her baby destroyed. She told her story to a Protestant minister, Rev. John Jay Slocum, in New York, who encouraged her to repeat it to a wider audience. According to the American Protestant Vindicator, by July of 1836 the book had sold 26,000 copies. Other publishers later issued books that supported Monk’s claims or were close imitators, or else they published tracts that refuted the tale. Historian Richard Hofstadter called it, in his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, "robably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom's Cabin."